Of art and men

Kevin Wallace’s first meeting with renowned ceramist Beatrice Wood taught him a lot about the woman whose last great dream he would eventually help fulfill. When he and his wife came to the door of her isolated Ojai home, Wood — well into her 90s at the time, dressed in her typical uniform of a sari with Indian jewelry around her neck and wrists — saw them peaking in through a window and dashed into another room. Wallace thought they had interrupted something. When her assistant greeted them, Wallace apologized for the intrusion, but the aid assured him they hadn’t interrupted anything: She just went to freshen her lipstick.

Young men, Wood once said, were half of the secret elixir that kept her sharp and vibrant even as she crept toward the century mark (the other half: chocolates), and when she saw Wallace — then young enough to be her grandson, if not great-grandson — approaching, she had to doll herself up. But her famous flirtatiousness, though charming, was only one part of her personality, something Wallace, who would later become the manager of the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, learned once he actually had the chance to talk with her.

“That’s the two-dimensional version of her, the sex and chocolates thing,” Wallace says. “But she was a person with a lot of depth and understanding. We draw more from her spirit for the center than celebrating this version of her, the easier one to grasp. It’s easy to grasp the woman in the saris who makes pots for thousands of dollars and talks about men. That was the surface of Beatrice Wood. But there is so much more there.”

On March 3, Wood would have celebrated her 115th birthday. Alas, she did not live to see that milestone — she passed away 10 years ago this month, at the age of 105. To say she lived a full life would be both an understatement and inaccurate: She lived several lives. That is what happens when you survive 19 presidencies, two World Wars and the invention of the automobile, the plane, the space shuttle, the television and the personal computer, and maintain essentially all your faculties right up to the end.

But Wood’s longevity is not the only remarkable aspect of her story. Even if she hadn’t made it past her 50s, her biography would still be notable, filled with her experiences as an actress in Paris; as a painter studying in the French village that raised Monet; as a member of New York bohemia, rendezvousing with some of the most important artists of the early 20th century; and, as a devoted student of philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, relocating to the same small town in the hills of Southern California where he established a school and starting a quiet career in pottery.

It is the coda, however — the final two decades she spent almost exclusively in Ojai, in the modest house with a breathtakingly immodest mountain view she built using funds from the sale of a single drawing by her friend and love interest, Marcel Duchamp — that largely cemented her legacy in the art world.

“She was discovered in her 80s,” says Janat Dudas, manager of the Beatrice Wood Center, “and peaked at 100.”

Born in San Francisco, as a teenager Wood took an interest in art, much to the dismay of her socialite parents, and at 18 she relocated to Giverny, France, Monet’s hometown and a spiritual learning center for aspiring artists. After a stint as an actress in Paris, where she performed under the alias “Mademoiselle Patricia,” she returned to the states. In New York, she fell in with the Dadaists, the “anti-art” rebels of the 1910s, and in love with Duchamp, one of the movement’s leaders, who encouraged her to abandon the classical painting style she had already mastered for a freer, more personal form, leading to the simple, almost childlike line drawings she created up until her death. Her relationship with Duchamp and his friend, writer Henri-Pierre Roché, inspired the latter’s novel Jules and Jim, later adapted into one of the seminal films of the French New Wave by director Francois Truffaut.

Wood’s supposed ménage-a-trois with Duchamp and Roché set her off on a search for a transcendent, committed kind of love — one which ultimately came up empty.

Although she had countless infatuations in her lifetime, Wood lamented that she “never married the man she loved, and never loved the men she married,” says Radha Sloss, the daughter of Rosalind Rajagopal, one of Wood’s closest friends, who, unable to pronounce “Beatrice” as a child, inadvertently created her nickname, “Beato.”

Wood said she was coerced into her first marriage, to a Canadian theater manager; it was later annulled, without having been consummated. The second was, quite literally, a union of convenience: In 1938, after a flood destroyed their North Hollywood home, she and her engineer boyfriend, Steve Hogg, wed in order to apply for Red Cross funding. Sloss remembers Hogg as “a very cantankerous man” who was always yelling on account of his deafness. Still, Wood insisted her friends treat him well, because, after all, he was her husband. They remained married until Hogg’s death in 1960 — and their relationship, she said, also went unconsummated. “She had all these other romantic notions, and she got heartbroken one after another,” Sloss says.

In between her marriages, however, Wood had an affair with a man she claimed to have “never stopped loving,” a British actor named Reginald Pole. Pole introduced her to the teachings of Krishnamurti, whose philosophy of peace, environmentalism and meditative knowledge she immediately embraced. Wood followed him across Europe, listening to him give speeches; while in Holland in the early 1930s, she purchased a set of baroque dessert plates. Unable to find a teapot to go along with it, she decided to make her own. She enrolled in a ceramics class at Hollywood High School and, at age 40, started down yet another artistic path.

As she had with painting, Wood began her exploration of the craft of pottery by mastering the traditional way of doing things — mentoring beneath glaze chemists Otto and Gertrud Natzler — before taking a turn for the less conventional.

“She was not a perfect craftsman,” says Martin Gewirtz, who directed the Beatrice Wood Studio prior to its transition into the Center for the Arts. “What you find with a Beatrice Wood piece is, if you have a gold chalice, it would be leaning, there would be a flaw somewhere. It was never her intention to make a perfect pot. She loved the form and she loved experimenting.”

And experiment she did: Her collection — selections from which are on permanent display at the center — runs the gamut, from ornately adorned vases, plates and bowls to sculptures of wild-eyed roosters and teapots shaped as mermaids. Her friend, celebrated author Anais Nin, once commented, “Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine.” Wood averaged 20 pieces per month for 65 years, slowing only in the year before her death.

Although she had representatives helping spread her name in the past, it wasn’t until 1981, at the age of 88, that Wood received her first legitimate ceramics exhibition. It sparked not only a renaissance that stretched over her remaining years, with museums and galleries across the world showing her work, but a reappraisal of her entire life.

A 1993 documentary dubbed her “the Mama of Dada.” As she closed in on 100, camera crews from CNN, PBS, Good Morning America and CBS Sunday Morning showed up at her doorstep, looking to profile her. In 1997, director James Cameron, having been given a copy of Wood’s autobiography "I Shock Myself," modeled the character of Rose, the elderly shipwreck survivor in his blockbuster Titanic, partially after her. Too sick to attend a screening, Cameron and actress Gloria Stuart visited her at home on her 105th birthday and brought Wood a copy of the movie, but she refused to watch it, saying it would be “too sad” to view in her condition. Nine days later, she died in her sleep.

“Unfortunately, it is often the situation where an artist is rediscovered, they do one show and pass away,” Wallace says. “She lived for another 25 years.”
 
As successful as Wood was artistically for her last quarter-century, personally, some close to her believe, there was a void. She never married again, never had children.

And while she entertained a constant stream of guests at her home, and was surrounded by assistants, apprentices and, until 1996, her best friend and neighbor Rajagopal, her twilight was spent mostly in seclusion, in an almost self-imposed exile in the hills of Ojai. For an artist who classified herself as “a monogamous woman in a polygamous world,” whose work often depicted couples wrapped in loving embrace, never having found the everlasting love she desired must have left at least part of her 105 years feeling empty.

“Her private life was really quite sad,” says Sloss, who cared for Wood in her waning days. “There is no way to make a happy ending of it.”

If there was a “happy ending” to Wood’s life, it happened posthumously. Spurred by her devotion to Krishnamurti, Wood first moved to Ojai in 1947; in 1974, she built what would become her final residence on a 450-acre parcel of land owned by Theosophical Society member Dr. Annie Besant’s Happy Valley Foundation. Wood’s vision, from the beginning, was to leave the house to the foundation and have it converted into a gallery, to showcase the work of other artists. In 2005, Wallace, who first entered Wood’s orbit when he curated an exhibit titled "Beatrice Wood: The Art of a Life for the Craft and Folk Art Museum" in Los Angeles, was approached by the foundation to help with the conceptualization of the art center. Though he did not have the opportunity to get to know Wood well on a personal level, the moments Wallace did spend with her led him past the saris and the men and the chocolates, and allowed him to grasp how she would have wanted the center to operate.

“As probably everybody will tell you, anyone who had an experience with her, she had a generosity of spirit, and was always giving of her time,” he says. “Since that time, now that I have researched her life, read her writing and talked to people [who knew her], I have a better sense of where that came from philosophically, and that’s the guiding spirit of the center.”

Today, the Beatrice Wood Center of the Arts features rotating exhibits, along with displays of Wood’s own art and that which she collected. It is the legacy she wanted to leave behind. Other things, however, she may have taken with her.

“She and my mother talked a lot … about what happens when you die,” Sloss says. “Beato had five men she was reserving for the next life. One of them was Gorbachev. My mom said, ‘I like him, you can’t have him.’ They were kidding, like two kids.”    

Beatrice Wood’s long life is being celebrated locally with exhibits of her work at two locations this month: the Massarella Gallery (109 S. Montgomery St., Ojai, 646-9453) and Caffe Bella (79 S. California St., Ventura, 643-2171). The Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts is located at 8560 Ojai-Santa Paula Rd., Ojai, 646-3381. For information on exhibits, visit www.beatricewood.com.