At 99, She Still Casts a Long Shadow in Her Field : Art: Ceramist’s work reflects whimsy and wit and are displayed in the permanent collections of 12 major U.S. museums.

Beatrice Wood seems to keep life’s delicious secrets mischievously bridled behind a vivacious, smiling face, only to have them spring defiantly from her internationally acclaimed clay works.

“My figures are full of laughter,” she said. “We, in the human race, will either go down to the depths or come up and out laughing uproariously.”

Shortly after her March 3 birthday, when she turned 99, Miss Wood was awarded the highest honor from the American Craft Council--the gold medal for craftsmanship.

“I’m very happy, but I’m puzzled and don’t really understand why they gave it to me,” she said later. “I think I got it on account of my disgusting ripe old age and the fact that I’m still working.”

Beverly Sanders, associate editor of American Craft magazine, disagreed.

“She has the most delightful (castings) in a very distinctive style,” she said from her New York office. “She creates wonderful figures. She was no kid when she got into ceramics.

“She endures.”

Miss Wood has slowed somewhat from earlier years, creating 12 to 15 pieces a month for the last two decades.

“Art very easily becomes a racket,” she said. “Artists become very self-centered and lose touch with the world. They should realize that human beings are more important.”

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Her ceramics are displayed in the permanent collections of 12 major U.S. museums, including the Smithsonian and New York’s Metropolitan Museum, as well as at museums around the globe.

There are hundreds of pieces in Miss Wood’s catalogue, from lusterware goblets and fiery glazed dishes and pots, to funny, folk-artsy figures fashioned with whimsy and wit.

Avid collector and fellow artist Lee Waisler, whose environmental and socially ethical works are displayed in his Venice, Calif., studio, described his favorite Beatrice Wood work.

“It’s a fantasy teapot 20 inches high and 24 inches across in gold luster done in 1983,” Waisler said. “It’s a Trojan horse on four wheels. The tail is the pot holder. It’s the most extraordinary piece of whimsy I’ve ever seen.”

During a recent visit, Miss Wood pointed out a 1991 work, “Modern Woman,” depicting a female hoisting a male over her head. The work, which has been bought for $16,000, is displayed near a miniature bordello called “Good Morning America,” replete with prostitutes advertising their wares out veranda windows.

The pieces are next to each other in the exhibition room of her studio.

The potter has created about six brothels in her lifetime. “In nearly 100 years that’s not many,” she says.

She also has made some rather cynical statements about marriage with her clay works. Take for instance, “Back Seat,” 1988, a grouping of five figures participating in the shotgun wedding of a pregnant bride.

“I never loved the jerks I married, yet I never married the men I loved,” she commented. “When a man behaves badly, my heart races faster and I make a funny figure.”

Miss Wood, a widow, has married twice and divorced once. But perhaps it was her unconventional liaisons that sparked her profuse commentary about love and life. She began her bohemian existence as a teen-ager in Paris.

Her affairs included painter and French chess champion Marcel Duchamp and author Henri-Pierre Roche. But she swears that the Francois Truffaut movie “Jules et Jim” is not about the threesome, as has been reported, but that Roche’s last novel, “Victor,” is.

In Paris, she associated with such modern art legends as Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso and Dadaists including Brancusi and Picaia.

Francis M. Naumann, an art historian based in New York City, said Miss Wood met Duchamp in 1916 while she was visiting French composer Edgard Varese. “Duchamp was the first to devote any serious attention to her drawings,” Naumann wrote for American Craft.

Miss Wood’s interest in art began with drawing and painting. Yet she also acted on the French stage, studied Russian dancing and pantomime, and published an autobiography, “I Shock Myself,” in 1986.

She did not study ceramics seriously until she was 45. At 55, she was racked with heartbreak over an affair that Roche had with another woman. She decided to seek the teachings of Krishnamurti, an East Indian philosopher based in this idyllic mountain town 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

She recovered her inner peace and set up shop in Ojai, where she lives to this day with her management team, two cats and four dogs.

She works with single-firing, in-glaze luster, a surface she achieves by mixing minerals and reducing oxygen during firing, wrote John Perreault in 1988.

“She has been known to throw mothballs into the kiln (resulting) in a surface that is more like glass that has been buried for centuries than like the uniform gold or silver of traditional Western lusterware,” he wrote.

Miss Wood stresses the importance of self-discipline and order in her workdays.

“I get up in the morning and before I get dressed, I put my clay in order and out to dry,” she explained. “I need to do correspondence. You know I can get up to 300 visitors in a month. . . . I do most of my work from 8 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. And I always organize my time to reserve 20 minutes for a stray cat I’ve adopted named Coco.”

Miss Wood shuns Western dress for an East Indian sari. Her creations are marketed by her manager, Ram Singh, and her day-to-day affairs are handled by two other staff people.

“I pay all my debts but I’m not interested in money, just ideas,” Miss Wood said.

But the potter doesn’t always like what she’s created.

“Occasionally I make some good things,” she said. “But once they’re done, I’m through with them. Some don’t bring out what I’ve visualized.”

And she doesn’t exactly know where she gets her inspiration.

“I know I’m very curious and very open to life, people, incidents,” she said. “An idea I get today is different from one I had 10 years ago. The only thing not different is that my craft has evolved.”