...the potter/artist who said "I owe it all to Art Books, Chocolate and Young Men."
Here's a snippet of her life. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-forgotten-legacy-of-cult-artist-beatrice-wood
Wood was a member of the New York Dada group and a pioneering sculptor. As a woman artist primarily working in ceramics, she also represented a demographic and a medium that were both marginalized during her lifetime. “More people know her for sleeping with Duchamp than for making her own work,” the artist Arlene Shechet told me when we discussed Wood’s legacy. “That needs to be rectified.”
Though a 1993 documentary later dubbed Wood the “Mama of Dada,” she is rarely listed among the movement’s pioneers. But in 1917, both she and Duchamp submitted works to the Society of Independent Artists’ first exhibition, which would double as Dada’s coming out.
“She was sort of the sensation of the show,” explains Francis Naumann, a Dada scholar, dealer, and dear friend of Wood’s. “Her work was attacked by the press.” The offending painting showed a woman’s naked torso with a real piece of soap affixed “at a very tactical position,” Wood would later explain.
In the last 20 years of her life, between the late 1970s and her death in 1998, Wood’s work did receive attention, thanks to support from several influential dealers—namely Naumann, who was based in New York, and Garth Clark, in L.A. Her prices rose, and for the first time since relinquishing her family’s fortune, she was making a healthy income. “In her diary, up through her 70s, she worries about infrequent sales, even having enough money for groceries,” explains Kevin Wallace, the Director of Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, a small museum run lovingly out of Wood’s former Ojai home and studio. “But, by the time she passed away, her estate had about $3 million in it.” It was during this period of prosperity that Midler paid her visit, and that Jasper Johns bought one of Wood’s works.
But the momentum wouldn’t survive the artist’s death. After her passing, the prices of her work plummeted. “The success was great for Beatrice, but it also encouraged speculation,” explains Naumann. “Amateur speculators realized that she would soon die, so they just kept buying her work. Then of course, they flooded the market as soon as she died, and the prices went down staggeringly. In fact, I bought one of her chalices at auction for less than $10,000—the same type that were sold for over $100,000 during her lifetime.”
It isn’t easy to see Wood’s work in person these days. The trip to Ojai is a long one for most, and the museums that do own her work rarely show it. But Wood’s passionate tribe of supporters, like the Wallaces, Naumann, Shechet, and many more, are committed to resurrecting her legacy—as a Dadaist, a pioneering sculptor, and an irreverent feminist of her own design.
Did I mention she lived to be 105 and was working in her studio even then! That's why there were vultures circling to acquire her work, and too bad, they were just greedy and smashed her market value.
She was quite an artist, and I love her experiments with glazes, which aren't really mentioned much in that article.
Figurative sculpture by Beatrice Wood
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