A True Romantic, and Pragmatist

In September 1981, I called Beatrice Wood to tell her that her exhibition, “Beatrice Wood: A Very Private View,” the inaugural show for the ceramics gallery that Mark Del Vecchio and I had just opened on Wilshire Boulevard, had been a great success financially and artistically. When she heard how many pots she had sold, she announced that this was the first time she could remember when she had more money coming in than she needed. While Beatrice always exaggerated her financial woes, this certainly was her most successful show to date and she pondered what luxuries she might indulge with her newfound wealth. “It’s either going to be a gigolo or a new vacuum cleaner,” she mused. Finally, she chose the vacuum cleaner.

For those who knew Beatrice Wood as an exotic, compulsive romantic (which she was) it often came as a surprise to discover that she was also a decided pragmatist. When she went to a university in the Midwest to receive an honorary doctorate, her acceptance speech to the arts faculty was not about creativity, but on the importance of writing a precise invoice. It was these two poles of her personality, seemingly opposite, that gave her balance and enabled her to navigate through a lifetime of 105 years.

Similarly, the artist who has become renown as a wildly promiscuous spirit, with her much overplayed liaisons with Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre Roche and others, was the most moral person I have ever known. She would probably be annoyed with me for saying this, for Beatrice loved cultivating the myth of her wickedness.

One of her greatest compliments came in 1917, when she, Picabia and Duchamp were strolling down the boardwalk at Coney Island and a policeman, seeing her in high spirits late at night with two bohemian men, attempted to arrest her as a streetwalker. Picabia was outraged, but Beatrice was delighted. She had been raised in a smothering atmosphere of bourgeois correctness by a socially ambitious and controlling mother, and being thought of as a lady of the night was a moment of exhilaration. Moreover, it was a liberation from burdensome propriety that she never forgot.

I first met Beatrice when she was a youthful 85, and even then she played the courtesan superbly, flirting with outrageous coquettishness. In part she was satisfying the legend that visitors had come to expect, and, after her years on the stage with the French National Repertory Company in New York, Beatrice knew how to deliver on a role. But it was also genuine because Beatrice adored men. One could see her blue eyes twinkle with interest and her back straighten when a handsome man entered the room. On my last visit to Beatrice (she was still only 104), she described a couple coming by to visit with their young son. “I have no idea how old he was,” she recalled, “maybe 16 or 17. But he was a little gem of manhood. If I was three months younger, I would have gone for him.”

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Wood’s relationship to men confused feminists for whom she was something of a role model--an independent female artist who had carved out a career on her own. When they met her, they found her ideas antithetical, even infuriating. I once took a feminist writer to have lunch with Beatrice. It all went well until Beatrice announced that the role of a woman was “to kiss the toes of a man.” The writer spluttered over her vegetarian platter (Beatrice had not eaten meat since she was 19 years old) and said, “But what about your work, your career?”

Beatrice responded, “Oh that, I’d give it all up tomorrow for the chance to dance the tango with a handsome Argentinian.” The writer left confused and saddened, but missed the point. The man for whom Beatrice would have given up her career did not exist--art was her life--and Wood’s teasing was pure Dada. She had learned games, or irony and perversity, from the Duchampian master. But part of that statement was real. It expressed a longing for that one special relationship that more than a hundred years of life could neither deliver nor erase.

As a child, Wood grew up believing in an ideal union. Even in her early 20s she was firmly convinced that she would find her knight on a white horse. Instead, she fell in love several times but never married any of these men. She married twice, but never loved either husband; indeed neither union was even consummated. Her husbands were strays that she took into her life. Later she learned it was wiser to take on only the canine and feline variety. However, Wood did touch her lovers very deeply, and there was nothing at all casual about these affairs; she remained close friends with Duchamp, Roche and others throughout their lives and was good friends with most of their wives, besides.

We were friends for 20 years, and I know why her lovers clung to her friendship even after the passion had passed. Beatrice had a way of bringing light and optimism into one’s life. Witty, positive and a fascinating raconteur, she was able to communicate her enthusiasm for life and for now. While she may have enjoyed telling stories from her long life, she never lived in the past. She was an extraordinary friend. Almost every momentous moment during our friendship is punctuated with a letter from Beatrice, congratulating, encouraging, commiserating. I never knew where she found the time to write these elegant, warm, poetic notes. Many of the times I did not even know how she had found out about those moments in my life.

She altered my life profoundly. Because of Wood, I am now an art dealer. I took her on at a low point in her career, thinking that I would simply sell a few pots for her on the side and then get on with my academic career. Within a few months, Mark and I had opened our gallery. Wood helped shape and mold the gallery through her patience, enthusiasm and her example as the most professional and dedicated artist with whom I have worked.

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I learned an early lesson. After the first exhibition in 1981 we planned a second one the following year of new work. Beatrice would call and complain about the “bloody minded” kiln and other irritating vagaries of the ceramics arts. I thought that the pressure of a new show was too much for an octogenarian. Offering to reduce the pressure, I telephoned her and suggested that she need not make new work because we had more than enough pieces in stock. There was a pause at the other end of the line, and she said firmly but unkindly, “Do not ever say that to me again.”

I got the message, and ever since we kept her on a schedule of at least one show of new works a year and sometimes as many as three. She never once missed a deadline. She usually delivered more works than we had requested. Even our current show contains a “new” work that she reglazed two months ago for this show.

To say that I will miss her is strangely incorrect. There are some people whose passing cannot lessen their daily presence in one’s life. Certainly, I mourn that I cannot drop in at her studio and home in Ojai and enjoy her laughter, lively discussions about art, sex and politics. I will miss the aromatic meals off her glittering plates. I will miss walking after her as she shuffled barefoot to her studio to show me the latest “horrors,” as she jokingly referred to her newly fired work in the kiln. But death alone cannot take away a spirit as vital and contagious as that of Beatrice Wood. She lives on in the life of her many friends, and one must compliment God for the wisdom of allowing her to stay somewhat longer than the average mortal. Certainly she used that time wisely and played out a life that shimmered, glittered, sparkled and seduced every bit as much as the luster pots she made for the last 65 years.