Beatrice Wood at Garth Clark - ceramics exhibition; New York, New York

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Brooks Adams

At 100, Beatrice Wood is still potting in fine form. Her new lusterware chalices are adorned with nude figures in high relief. With their legs splayed and their hands on their heads, these figures suggest primal meditation positions or some form of bacchic body worship; the buxom females might also be seen as idealized self-images. After a career as an actress in pre-World War I Paris and New York and as a member of Walter and Louise Arensberg's circle, Wood had an affair with Marcel Duchamp and the diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche that inspired Roche's novel upon which the film Jules and Jim is based. She then followed the Arensbergs to California in 1928 and started potting in 1933 at age 40 by taking classes at Hollywood High.

Wood is an instance of a woman who, after a long and fascinating life, really comes into her own as an artist in her ninth decade. A well-known denizen of Ojai, California, who studied with Krishnamurti and who for the last 28 years has worn only saris, she is currently making enough work to have had three simultaneous shows at Clark's galleries in New York, Kansas City and Los Angeles. Author of five books, including her autobiography I Shock Myself (1988) and The Thirty-Third Wife of the Maharajah (1992) about her travels in India, Wood has become something of an institution, receiving approximately 300 visitors a month who make the pilgrimage to visit her in Ojai.

The traditional symbology of the chalice form carries overtones of some Arthurian and Parsifalian orgy, a kind of syncretic, cups-raised cult of the self. The largish vessels have subtly changing metallic sheens, distended necks (which sometimes evoke the cosmetic deformations of African tribal women) and multilobed handles. The chalices from 1992-93 are slathered with glazes that vary from goldy-orange to purply-gold to pinky-orange. The shades change distinctly as you look at the chalices from different angles.

Standing as high as 15 inches, they can be relatively restrained in form, with three button shapes in a line down the neck forming the principal ornament, or considerably more complex in silhouette, suggesting octopus tendrils and Renaissance glass in their curlicued shapes. The recent platters, both footed and flat, are significantly less adorned except for a slightly pockmarked luster glaze made by throwing leaves and mothballs into the kiln; these intentional accidents of process subtly inflect the big, gold surfaces, rendering them now glowing, now matte.

Wood has become a legendary figure in crafts circles and is the subject of a new documentary, Beatrice Wood: Mama of Dada, co-produced by Diandra Douglas, that was shown at the Whitney last April. Yet for all this, her work remains insufficiently known in New York art circles, and a planned retrospective of her work at the American Craft Museum has been postponed. This is a pity, for Beatrice Wood belongs in the pantheon of great American women artists.