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woman's nude torso with a bar of real soap placed over the genitals. The trio Beatrice Wood also arranged the famous Blindman's Ball, a benefit for the short-lived avant- Still making art, and mischief , after all these years. garde publication The Blin)rnan; the evening culminated in Wood dancing By Hunter Drohojowska Philp on the tabletops and Duchamp swing- ing from a chandelier. eatrice Wood has lector. The middle-aged Roch6 became After a loveless marriage to a man eyes as blue and un- her lover; Duchamp introduced her to who spent her money, in the 1920s Wood troubled as the sky modern art. The threesome spent many lived off the kindness of friends, and her above her home in a boisterous night at the famous salons ar-t career stalled. One night, Duchamp Southern 's hosted by the adventuresome art collec- handed her an envelope with the caveat verdant Ojai Valley. tors'Walter and Louise Arensberg. that she not open it until she got home. Her long white hair is During Wood's first visit to their It contained a much-needed $50. coiled in braids, and townhouse-lined with paintings by Wood jokes that she never slept with she looks regal in an ivory silk caftan, Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp (includ- the men she wed and never wed the her chains of crystals and pearls twined ing his fallnori,s Nu)e Deren?ing a Staircate men she loved (her second husband, with hear,lz turquoise. On the verge of No. 2) .-she sneered, "Such scrawls." whom she married in the late '50s, died turning 104, named a Living Treasure in 1960). Her painful romantic relation- by the State of California, she is busy ships led her to the study ofTheosophy, turning out golden-glazed pottery, erot- to the Indian guru , ic sculpture, and sprightly drawings for and to California. "All the hardships in the exhibition "Beatrice Wood: A Cen- Iife teach us to overcome them," muses tennial Tribute," opening on her birth- Wood. "If you have a happy marriage, day, March 5, and continuing through you have no desire to paint." Though, Jule B at the American Craft Museum she adds, "I might have preferred the in New York. (Smaller shows have been happy marriage." organized by the Craft & ln 1953, at 40, Wood began to srudy Folk Art Museum until March 23 ard pottery in , first at a local at Frank Lloyd Gallery in I-os Angeles high school and later with the Austrian March 15 through April 12.) refugee ceramists Otto and Gertrud "AIl the time I was 60, 70, I was Natzler. She developed her signature plunged in despair over old age," says lustrous glazes on strongly shaped ves- Wood. "Now that I ve reached my pres- sels. During that period she also began ent age, I absolutely feel ageless. Any making figurative ceramics in a con- young rnan of 25 is as attractive to me sciously naive style-works she calls as if I were 16." Of the talents con- "sophisticated primitives," which have tributing to her success Wood counts Duchamp promptly challenged her to social and, ofcourse, sexual themes. one humble skill as the most imporlant: do better and invited her to his studio. Today, in Wood's magenta and sage "A woman facing the world of men has When she'd finished a dozen or so sitting room, the shelves are full of her to be organized to survive," she insists. drawings, Duchamp flipped through lusqz ceramic couplings and tableaux of "I would organize my days, but not my them, declaring "good, bad, bad, good, bordellos. "I had to have some emotion- friendships.-I let those be sponta- bad." Wood says, "He kind of broke my al outlet because I've been a nun for so neous." As a result, scarcely a day of sentimentality. I would try to make many years," she says, smiling. At the Wood's Iong life seems to have been women with flowers, then I would do suggestion that her figures were influ- burdened by boredom. At 17, rebelling something just out of annoyance. Of enced by the erotic sculpture of India, against her privileged East Coast up- course, those were the ones from the un- where she went frequently to collect 'Wood bringing, she went to to study art conscious, which were attractive to him." folk art, retorts, "I don't need in- and, Iater, theater. 'Wood continued to create drawings spiration for the erotic side to life." The outbreak of World War I forced based mostly on events from her life, Though she is a lifelong vegetarian her to return to New York, where, in using a spontaneous, unpolished style. who never smoked nor drank, Wood 1916, she fell in with Dadaist Marcel h 1917, Wood helped Duchamp and assigns less abstemious reasons for her Duchamp and his friend Henri-Pierre Roch6 organize the Socieqz of Indepen- longeviSz: "Chocolate and young men," Roch6, a French diplomat and art col- dent Artists, exhibiting her drawing of a she says with a mischievous smile. I

144 ART & ANTIQUt.,S