Living in the Timeless: Drawings by Beatrice Wood
Emmons and Von Romberg Galleries
5-11-2014 through 8-31-2014
Checklist (as of 2-14-2014)
Biography
BeatriceWood: Sophisticated Primitive (Dissertation)
This exhibition of [drawings from 1910 to 1997] could easily have been subtitled ”the artist tells all,” so clear is the picture it provides of Beatrice Wood. The images are mostly delicate in line and color and variously perfumed with Cubism, Surrealism, American modernism and commercial illustration. But the underlying scent is romance. Overtly or covertly autobiographical, the images are dominated by beautiful, sometimes bare-breasted young women; lean, brooding young men, and references to betrayal, lovers’ tiffs and reconciliations.
Wood, who died at age 105, will be best remembered as a late-blooming ceramic artist who developed a seductive palette of smoky, iridescent lusterware glazes in her studio in Ojai, Calif. Her drawings are something else entirely: a happy, somewhat mindless mix of art, life and persona, the latter of a free-living bohemian. Born in 1893 in San Francisco to a well-to-do, overly protective family, Wood nonetheless got herself to Paris by age 17, studying drawing at the Academie Julian. Returning to New York in 1914, she joined a circle of avant-gardists that included Walter and Louise Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Edgar Varese.
She was closest to Marcel Duchamp and his friend Henri-Pierre Roche, a diplomat and writer. The three founded The Blind Man, an early Dada journal, and conducted a triangulated love affair that inspired Roche’s novel ”Jules et Jim,” and, in turn, the film by Francois Truffaut. Duchamp encouraged Wood to modernize her drawings.
Mostly she simply seems to have enjoyed being a girl, in a way that may bring to mind any number of young women painting and photographing today. Like theirs, her works on paper mix feminism and femininity and are alternately revealing and self-indulgent, but are rarely outstanding. … Luckily this impression is dispelled by Wood’s ceramics, a few of which are also included in this fascinating show.
– excerpted from Roberta Smith, Beatrice Wood: Drawing for Life, New York Times, March 26, 1999 [illustrated with selected drawings from the SBMA exhibition]
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/26/arts/art-in-review-beatrice-wood-drawing-for-life.html