ART : The Brimming Bowl...

“I was born in 1703,” artist Beatrice Wood has often told people, teasing them with her cheeky deadpan delivery and sidestepping an onslaught of questions about her illustrious past. All the marvelous stories associated with Wood’s life, she will readily acknowledge, are indeed true.

To escape the confining atmosphere of her blue-blood New York upbringing, she went to France after finishing school to study acting. While there, she did glimpse through a hedge to catch sight of Monet painting in the garden at Giverny; she studied drawing at the Academie Julien and attended the scandalous premiere of Stravinsky’s “La sacre du printemps.”

When World War I began, Wood returned to the United States and soon landed in the middle of the New York Dada movement. She still lived with her parents and performed as an actress with the French Repertory Company, but she began to frequent the salon evenings presented by modern art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. There Wood was introduced to new ideas in the company of a remarkable generation of artists and writers--Marcel Duchamp, Henri Pierre Roche, Man Ray, Francis Picabia. Wood wrote three lines every day in her diary and continued to make drawings; her pictures conveying romantic interludes, restless moments and ill-fated adventures constitute a visual record of her increasingly avant-garde life. In 1928 she headed out west, leaving behind the last vestiges of her Edwardian upbringing.

It was in Los Angeles that she began to work in ceramics. That particular story--how she first began to create the lusterware vessels and figures that have since bought her international recognition--is simple and scarcely portentous: Unable to find a teapot to match six antique luster plates that she had bought in Holland, Wood enrolled in a ceramics class at Hollywood High School, fully expecting to produce the desired teapot within the first 24 hours. Instead, she unexpectedly embarked on her life’s work.

Going on to study with Viennese master ceramists Otto and Gertrude Natzler, Wood entered a world where craft is deservedly recognized as art. In 1948, Wood moved her household and studio north and settled in the verdant Ojai Valley. Recalling the move in her 1985 autobiography, “I Shock Myself,” she wrote: “Ojai was the pot of gold at the end of a long obstacle-strewn rainbow. From the moment I arrived on March 3, 1948, time ceased.”

In her captivating memoir, Wood doesn’t really pin down events to specific dates. Her life story unfolds, shaped by her rich emotional and creative life; there is, however, a chronology included at the back of the book.

Beatrice Wood was born in San Francisco on March 3, 1893; it was on her 55th birthday that she reached Ojai, her home at the rainbow’s end.

In 1983, Wood decided it was time to set the record straight and clarify the question of her age; at least one museum had assumed that her 1703 response was a typo and published Wood’s birth year as 1903. 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.

Most everyone was surprised by this announcement because it rarely occurs to anyone who has met Wood that she could possibly be considered old. As the placement of the chronology at the end of her autobiography makes obvious, to measure and calculate life according to a calendar is simply an afterthought and a method for reading experience as history.

On Valentine’s Day weekend, when I go to visit Beatrice Wood at her studio in Upper Ojai’s Happy Valley, the surrounding hills are extraordinarily green from all the winter rains. In the distance beyond lush fields, the mountain Topa-Topa looms protectively. The landscape is beautiful and comforting. Wood first visited this area in 1926, when Krishnamurti, the East Indian philosophical teacher, chose it as the site for his camp meetings (eventually, in 1947, the area became home to the Happy Valley School, a creative, non-competitive secondary educational institution founded by Krishnamurti and his associate Rosalind Rajagopal, along with theosophist leader Dr. Annie Besant and writer Aldous Huxley).

In her autobiography Wood says she was initially “bewitched by the beauty of the enchanting valley,” and still, to this day, that sense of enchantment regenerates and flourishes when she speaks of Ojai.

Wood’s home and studio are located in a sprawling ranch house set back from the main road on the crest of a hill. Although her original roadside sign advertising “Beatrice Wood: Fine Pottery, Reasonable and Unreasonable” has been replaced by a plainer and more demure notice--Beatrice Wood Studio--her gallery-sitting room is still open to the public and receives hundreds of visitors a month.

Wood’s exhibition space manages to combine the coziness of a parlor with the cool sophistication of a museum. The work for sale here is handsomely displayed in illuminated white cases. As sun pours in through the corner windows, the luster glazes on Wood’s ceramics shimmer in the changing light. There are robust goblets and generous bowls alongside the modeled figures Wood refers to as “sophisticated primitives.”

Everywhere in the room, Wood’s humor is evident: A large golden blowfish (titled “Single Parent”) is accompanied by two smaller versions of itself, a triple vision of surprised expressions and spiky halos; men wearing top hats cuddle up to bare-breasted women; the distinctly fig leaf-free Adam and Eve are intruded upon by a grinning, lascivious serpent, and two pairs of earthenware feet, one stood in high heels and the other in hefty brogues, are engaged in a vigorous game of footsie.

This is the battle of the sexes high drama rendered as a ribald comedy.

In her Ojai gallery, Wood, dressed in a pale turquoise sari and surrounded by shocking-pink pillows, is seated in a corner window seat. Wood has chosen to wear only saris since the 1960s, when she toured India with exhibitions of her work.

“Saris really do suit her and they are the perfect fashion solution, aren’t they?” says Wood’s assistant, Stephen Dragovich. “It’s great to be free from having to think about what to wear.” Adorned with an array of silver bangles and rings, a stunning collection of both East Indian and American jewelry, Wood proves the maxim that people with true style needn’t be bothered with fashion.

As a steady stream of visitors arrives at the gallery--to see the artist’s ceramics as well as her extensive collection of folk art, and, of course, Beatrice Wood herself--she greets them with a sublime if slightly inscrutable smile. Wood playfully punctures self-consciously awe-struck birthday greetings by calling her age “obscene,” “absurd” and “ridiculous.”

Since making her widely quoted remark that chocolates and young men are her passion, many of Wood’s visitors come bearing chocolates, but young men seem to be offered in noticeably shorter supply.

“Lou (Louise) Arensberg and I used to love to go to fortunetellers,” Wood recalls. “We never took them seriously, but it was as entertaining as going to the theater. All fortunetellers say that you have a husband in your future, and for 10 minutes you are so happy.”

At the conclusion of her memoir, Wood wrote: “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.”

Two of the great loves of Wood’s life were French diplomat turned novelist Henri Pierre Roche and artist Marcel Duchamp. In the New York days of the Arensbergs’ salon, the three were what Wood has referred to an “ amour a trois. “

It has often been suggested that Roche’s novel “Jules and Jim” (made into a popular film by Francois Truffaut) was based on this relationship. Although the essential triangle--two men who are great friends and share the love of the same woman--might appear to be similar, Roche’s book is a work of fiction. The novel’s heroine, Catherine, is a worldly woman with a quixotic temperament. Regarding her involvement with Roche and then Duchamp (one relationship following the other), Wood, who was then in her 20s, has described herself as unknowing, a young woman “raised on fairy tales.”

The years spent with Roche and Duchamp, friendships that continued until the end of both men’s lives, not only opened her eyes, but also richly nourished her life as an artist. It was Duchamp who advised Wood early on to “never do the commonplace,” and Roche who tenderly coaxed and cared for her highly romantic, inquisitive nature.

But she never married either of these men. During Wood’s travels in India, nine different astrologers told her that she would not have luck in the house of marriage. “Three years ago a woman, a clairvoyant, read my cards,” Wood confides, with a look of mischief crossing her face.

“She said, ‘Oh, you are to be married soon.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no.’ And she said, ‘Yes, it is very close, within weeks; you have no idea how close it is.’ I had such fun with that, looking at every man who walked through the door.” She starts to laugh; her gently amused laugh seems to start at a simmer and build to a throaty, low-rolling boil.

“Well, that was three years ago,” she continues, her laugh lowering to a steady giggling simmer. “It is kind of taming down now.” Her laugh resumes, her exuberance and curiosity seemingly endless.

In celebration of Wood’s 100th birthday, there will be three exhibitions of ceramic work at the Garth Clark Galleries in Los Angeles, Saturday to March 31; New York, March 9-April 3, and Kansas City, Mo., March 12-April 16.

In Los Angeles, there is also an exhibition of her drawings at the Couturier Gallery (through April 10), a show of photographs of the artist by Marlene Wallace titled “Images of Beato: A Photographic Survey of Beatrice Wood, 1977-1993” at Ovsey Gallery (through March 31) and the world premiere Wednesday of a documentary film directed by Tom Neff, titled “Beatrice Wood: The Mama of Dada,” at the Pacific Design Center Theater. Wood has remarked that if she had known how much she was going to enjoy being a movie star, she would have started this new career earlier.

Included in Wood’s exhibition at the Couturier Gallery is a drawing from 1930 titled “Marriage.” A man and woman sit very close to one another. His arm is raised as he holds a cup of coffee to his lips; looking off to one side, he is poised to dash out of an unseen door.

The woman looks up, heavenward, into a dream. Hovering behind them, pale pink shadows appear like ghosts, auras of their unrealized lives. In Wood’s figurative work, men always appear to be running out, leaving trails of broken hearts and dashed dreams behind them.

During one segment of “Beatrice Wood: The Mama of Dada,” she looks directly into the camera; her eyes, blue as lapis lazuli, are caught in a contented and steady gaze: “When the bowl that was my heart was broken,” she says, “laughter fell out.”

Beatrice Wood’s delight in the world continues.