Ceramist Beatrice Wood, the ‘Mama of Dada,’ Dies

Beatrice Wood, the Ojai ceramist whose liaisons with artist Marcel Duchamp, writer Henri-Pierre Roche and others associated with the Dada movement of the early 20th century earned her the appellation “Mama of Dada,” died Thursday.

The artist--who at age 100 insisted that, since scientists had proved that time and space did not exist, she was “actually only 32”--was 105.

Her health had waned since a severe bout of bronchitis and pneumonia in 1994 and complications from gastrointestinal surgery. She spent the last several months in a wheelchair.

Wood died in her Topa Topa Mountain studio and home near Ojai, said her Los Angeles dealer, Frank Lloyd.

In observation of her 105th birthday a few days ago, Wood presented “Titanic” director James Cameron with the annual Beatrice Wood Film Award at a party in her studio. Cited for giving up his director’s fee in order to realize his vision, Cameron had interviewed Wood in creating the role of the adventurous 101-year-old Rose, played by Oscar nominee Gloria Stuart.

A resident of Ojai’s verdant Happy Valley since 1948, Wood was a community fixture who graciously held court for drop-ins in her ranch home, which doubled as a public gallery and drew hundreds of visitors each month. Always clad in a trademark sari and dripping a challenging amount of silver jewelry, Wood never allowed her failing hearing to hinder her in welcoming her guests, usually with the aid of an assistant. Guests were often treated to a tour of the home, which is filled with ceramics, drawings and a museum of memorabilia from Wood’s colorful past.

The author of several books, Wood became as celebrated for her rebelliousness and insolent wit as her ceramics. Often citing “chocolate and young men” as the key to her longevity, Wood once noted: “Chocolate is my passport. Anyone who comes here must bring chocolate if they want a nice visit.”

Wood’s ceramics are displayed in the permanent collections of 12 major U.S. museums, including the Smithsonian and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at museums around the globe. At 100, she was the subject of the documentary “Beatrice Wood: The Mama of Dada.” Wood celebrated her 103rd birthday with a retrospective exhibition of 103 objects, many of them recently made, at La Jolla’s Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art.

She was noted for pioneering exquisite “luster” glazes in luminous colors including dark green, gold, pink and blue. Critics have described Wood’s clay figures as brimming with whimsy and sensuality. The works often poked fun at social artifice, political hypocrisy and the battle of the sexes. A piece called “Modern Woman,” created in 1991, depicts a female hoisting a male over her head. Wood also created miniature bordellos out of clay.

The same sensual qualities extended to her abstract work. Wrote one critic: “Wood’s robust sensibility carries the day, much as her lusty feel for color, form and texture transforms abstract art pottery into delectable objects you want to sidle up to and fondle.”

Unlike her bold ceramics, Wood’s wispy drawings have been called “spare and supple things, sensuous of line and sly of content,” taking their cues from Cubism.

Cats, coquettish young women, the Madonna and Queen Elizabeth I were favorite subjects for Wood.

“Did you know what Queen Elizabeth I did with ambassadors? Each had to spend a night with her, and the one with the best qualifications got the job,” Wood once wrote in a brochure for one of her exhibitions.

Wood--who for years cheekily insisted she was born in 1703--was actually born in San Francisco on March 3, 1893, and was brought up in blue-blood New York society. Although she steadfastly challenged the relevance of age, on her 90th birthday, Wood walked into the Ojai police station and turned in her driver’s license, announcing that “old people should not be allowed to drive.”

Born to a well-to-do family, Wood studied acting in Paris in her teens and drawing at the Academie Julien. While there, she peered through a hedge to catch sight of Monet painting in the garden at Giverny, and attended the scandalous premiere of Stravinsky’s “La Sacre du Printemps.” When World War I began, Wood returned to the United States and landed in the middle of the New York Dada movement.

In New York, she lived with her parents but acted with the French Repertory Company. She formed friendships with writers and avant-garde artists--most notably Duchamp, her most celebrated lover--and began to attend the salon evenings of modern art patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg. It has often been suggested that the love triangle in Roche’s novel “Jules et Jim” was based on a menage a trois involving Wood, Duchamp and Roche, but it was never confirmed.

During the era, Wood drew a nose-thumbing red stick figure for a 1917 poster advertising a ball supporting an avant-garde literary magazine. At Wood’s 100th birthday party at the Pacific Design Center, similar stick figures appeared in frosting atop two birthday cakes (lemon chiffon with blueberries and chocolate with raspberries).

As a young woman, Wood had two unconsummated marriages. In the late 1920s, she married a man from Belgium who, it turned out, was a bigamist. An assistant to Wood said she rarely spoke of him after the marriage ended, and when she did, identified him only as “Paul.”

Her second husband was Steven Hoag, a real estate appraiser, with whom she had an amicable but platonic marriage that lasted several years until his death.

She never married Duchamp or Roche--and many of her artworks depict love gone awry. She would later write in her 1985 autobiography “I Shock Myself”:

“In a way, my life has been an upside-down experience. I never made love to the (two) men I married, and I did not marry the men I loved. I do not know if that makes me a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl gone good.”

In 1928, Wood moved from New York to Los Angeles. Her first experience with ceramics was a modest one. Unable to find a teapot to match six antique luster plates she had bought in Holland, she enrolled in a ceramics class at Hollywood High School, planning to make herself a teapot and be done with it. Instead, she embarked on a career. She went on to study with Viennese master ceramists Otto and Gertrude Natzler, wartime expatriates who settled in Los Angeles.

In 1948, at age 55, she moved her household and studio north to the artist community of Ojai, following her spiritual advisor, Krishnamurti. The sign outside her studio once read: “Beatrice Wood: Fine Pottery, Reasonable and Unreasonable.”

Friends knew her by the nickname “Beato,” coined by a friend’s baby who could not pronounce Wood’s first name. She signed her early paintings and drawings “Bea,” but signed her later pottery works “Beato” because, as she said, it was easier to write “Beato” than “Beatrice Wood” on the bottom of a bowl.

In 1962, Wood visited India as a cultural ambassador, sponsored by the State Department. She returned with a reconfirmed interest in things Indian. After that period, she wore nothing but saris, scorning the caprices of fashion. It was in India that nine astrologers pointed out to her that she would not have luck in the house of marriage.

A devotee of flirting even after her 100th birthday, Wood maintained a lifelong fascination with affairs of the heart.

“My interest was not in art, it was in being in love. I think that’s how it should be for women,” she once said.

In 1995, at age 102, an exhibition titled “Beatrice Wood: Aphrodisia” at Cal State Northridge’s Art Galleries included her work “First Kiss,” drawn in 1994.

She said in 1995: “I’m a little old lady living very happily with my memories.”

Throughout her long life, Wood remained philosophical about choosing the road less traveled.

“ ‘No’ is the most dangerous word in the English language,” she once said. “If my mother hadn’t said ‘no,’ I would have married a stockbroker and I wouldn’t be here today.”

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