Beatrice Wood

Beatrice Wood (born March 3, 1893, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died March 12, 1998, Ojai, California) was an American ceramicist who was dubbed the “Mama of Dada” as a result of her affiliation with the Dada movement and artist Marcel Duchamp. She gained celebrity for her pottery, for her unusual lustreware in particular, and inspired a character in the book Jules et Jim (1953; film 1961) as well as the 101-year-old Rose character in the film Titanic (1997).

At age five Wood moved with her family from the West Coast to New York City. Raised in a well-to-do household that was governed by the social conventions of the turn of the 20th century, Wood rebelled against her affluent, society lifestyle when in 1910 she went to Paris as a teenager to study art at the Académie Julian. At the outbreak of World War I, Wood returned to New York City at the request of her parents and chose to pursue theatre and acting. Her fluency in French allowed her to join the French National Repertory Theatre. It was during that period that she met Dada artist Duchamp. He introduced her to French diplomat and writer Henri-Pierre Roché and the wider New York City Dada circle and encouraged her interest in modern art. Among her acquaintances were Walter and Louise Arensberg, a couple who helped finance and enliven the modern art movement through their elaborate evening soirees. With Roché and Duchamp, Wood founded the short-lived Dada magazine The Blind Man in 1917. She also created drawings and posters for other Dadaist magazines, made whimsical and autobiographical drawings, watercolours, and collages, and began exhibiting her work at Society of Independent Artists shows. It was at that point that she became known as the “Mama of Dada.”

After time spent abroad and in New York City, Wood moved in 1928 to the Los Angeles area to be closer to Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and her former benefactors the Arensbergs. Wood gravitated toward Eastern religion and Krishnamurti’s philosophy, which soon began to shape her lifestyle, artistic output, and aesthetic. In 1933, at age 40, the artist took an interest in ceramics and enrolled in an adult education course at Hollywood High School. By the late 1930s, she had begun to study with University of Southern California artist Glen Lukens, but she ultimately found her most-influential mentors in Gertrud and Otto Natzler. The Natzlers shared their techniques and glazes with Wood, though they worried that her work bore too close a resemblance to their signature style. She moved on to work independently and became a pioneer of in-glaze lustres that were singular in colour palette. Department stores such as Neiman Marcus and Marshall Field’s began carrying her functional ceramic wares, while museums such as such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to exhibit her work.

In 1948 Wood moved northwest of Los Angeles to Ojai, California, to be nearer to Krishnamurti, who had settled there earlier. While selling her dinnerware and vessels to department stores, she worked part-time as a ceramics instructor at Happy Valley School (now Besant Hill School). In 1961 she was invited by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Indian government to do a 14-city tour of India, lecturing and exhibiting her pottery. During that trip, the first of a number she would make to that region of the world, she adopted the sari as her preferred style of dress.

The 1960s and ’70s saw the inception of Wood’s series of small sculptures that she called “sophisticated primitives.” In those figural works Wood expressed her pessimism toward sexual relations and marriage as well as variations on the idea of prostitution. In the 1980s she exhibited her figurative sculptures and others, though they generally were not as well received as her non-figural works.

Late in life, Wood published a number of books. The first, The Angel Who Wore Black Tights (1982), is an autobiographical novel based on her time spent as an adolescent in France. With the encouragement of her friend writer Anaïs Nin, Wood published an autobiography, I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood (1985). The travel memoirs Pinching Spaniards (1988) and 33rd Wife of a Maharajah: A Love Affair in India (1992) followed. Wood also continued to work as a ceramicist until her death at age 105.