Beatrice Wood: Sophisticated Primitive Helen Dixon Hennessey
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2004 Beatrice Wood: Sophisticated Primitive Helen Dixon Hennessey Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BEATRICE WOOD: SOPHISTICATED PRIMITIVE By HELEN DIXON HENNESSEY A Dissertation submitted to the Program in the Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004 Copyright © 2004 Helen Dixon Hennessey All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Helen D. Hennessey defended on 4 December 2003. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Professor Directing Dissertation Nancy Smith Fichter Outside Committee Member William Cloonan Committee Member Karen L. Laughlin Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am grateful for the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research year (1997-1998) and a professional development leave from Florida A&M University (Fall 2003). I am also beholding to several people who greatly assisted my completing this work: Francis M. Naumann, exacting art historian and loyal friend of Beatrice Wood; Judith Throm, head librarian of the Archives of American Art; and especially my major professor, W.T. Llamon, Jr., consistently patient and kind. Many others helped through interviews: notably Otto Heino, Beth Hapgood, Margot Wilkie, and Garth Clark. Many others unnamed are remembered. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of figures v Abstract vi 1. ART: OBJECT AS SUBJECT 1 2. ARTIST IN SEARCH OF A MEDIUM 16 3. TOE-TO-TOE WITH NIHILISM: THE SHOCKS 45 4. BALANCE ACHIEVED 74 5. SEEING IT HER WAY: THE VISUAL ARTS 104 The Ephemeral: Drawings 112 The Grounding Medium: Clay 126 The Vessels 129 “Sophisticated Primitives” 133 6. OUT ON HER OWN: WRITING IT DOWN 141 The Autobiographical Writing 151 The Plays 152 7. “I THINK OF ANOTHER POT. .”: THE KINAESTHETIC 171 APPENDIX 182 NOTES 234 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 239 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 255 iv LIST OF FIGURES Plate 1 Beatrice Wood at the wheel (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace 1 Plate 2 Blindman’s Ball poster; B. Wood dancing: photograph 15 Plate 3 Un peut [sic] d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap) (1917/1977): replica: pencil, colored pencil, and soap on cardboard 39 Plate 4 Marriage (1987); Bureaurcracy [sic] (1970): sophisticated primitives 44 Plate 5 Beatrice Wood posing as poster (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace 73 Plate 6 Gold Luster Footed Bowl (1968): vessel 103 Plate 7 Lit de Marcel [Marcel’s Bed] (1917): watercolor 114 Plate 8 Dieu protege les amants [God Protects Lovers] (1917): watercolor 119 and ink on paper Plate 9 Journee (1917): watercolor and ink on paper 121 Plate 10 Beatrice et ses douze enfants (Beatrice and Her Twelve Children) 124 (1917): watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper Plate 11 Gold Chalice (1992): vessel 131 Plate 12 Settling the Middle East Question (1958): sophisticated primitive 136 Plate 13 Is My Hat On Straight? (1971): sophisticated primitive 137 Plate 14 Autobiography cover: Beatrice Wood, age 15 140 Plate 15 “Yes, you are Minerva on a toothpick.”(1982): illustration 147 for travel book Plate 16 “Last night seems far away from a search for the absolute.” (1982): 148 illustration for travel book Plate 17 Poster for Beatrice Wood Memorial Folk Dance (1998) 170 v ABSTRACT Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), at 104, was declared a “Living Treasure” in her native California and “Esteemed American Artist” by the Smithsonian Institution in 1997. She was an internationally recognized ceramicist, known especially for her trademark luster glazes, and was the last surviving member of the New York Dada group of 1915-1923. Featured in “late-bloomer” books, she did not begin pottery until the age of forty, and according to her dealer and art historian Garth Clark, created her “masterpieces” in her last two decades. Her involvement with the New York Dada group and especially Marcel Duchamp was, in a sense, rediscovered by another art historian, Francis M. Naumann, in the late 1970s who wrote several articles usually concerning her drawings and her association with the Arensberg Circle and curated a bi-coastal retrospective of her work. She was quite celebrated at the end of her life, evidenced by over 600 articles about her work and her life. She also worked in other media beyond the luster pottery: often humorous sculptural forms in clay she named “sophisticated primitives;” professional acting in French in her youth; and writing, including four plays (one published here for the first time), an autobiography, three travel books, among others. But the pieces and the performances were not the whole of Beatrice Wood’s appeal: her dramatic persona, wit, and openness to people kept her doors open to hundreds of visitors a month toward the end of her life. Part biography and part analysis, this study considers issues such as her aesthetic approach, choice of media, being a woman and an artist, balancing career and life, spiritual thought and feeling, and politics. I extend a phrase Naumann uses to describe her drawings, “compatible contradictions,” to much of her other work and her life as well. Her “Dada state of mind” is joined to the Victorian, Romantic, as well as the vi Pragmatic. While she is not, unlike Picasso or Duchamp, the single most important artist of the twentieth century, she can be seen as a “little artist” (her term) who bridges and is an exemplar for many contemporary concerns. vii 61 Plate l Beatrice Wood at the wheel (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace 1 CHAPTER 1 ART: OBJECT AS SUBJECT But if you were to hide the world in the world so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things. -Chuang Tzu (Burton Watson, tr.) The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life. -A.S. Byatt, Possession, 416-7 The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up Beatrice Wood died on March 12, 1998, nine days after her 105th birthday. She died warm in her own bed, in the manner Jack Dawson predicted for Rose, the Titanic character she inspired, in excellent spirits and in good health until a few days before her death. Unlike Rose she had no children, but she passed surrounded by loving friends and associates. Hundreds of people had attended her birthday party on March 3rd and three days later she had given a party for director James Cameron and actress Gloria Stuart to whom she gave the fifth annual Beatrice Wood Film Award. In 1994 the governor of her native California, Pete Wilson, had declared her a "Living Treasure" and the Smithsonian Institution named her "Esteemed Living Artist" that same year. She had been awarded two honorary doctorates and held, as she said, "a Ph.D. in Lying." She was an internationally recognized ceramist, known especially for her spectacular lustre glazes, and was the last member of the New York Dada group of 1915-1923 to die. Featured in "late-bloomer" books, she did not begin pottery until the age of forty, and according to her dealer and ceramic historian Garth Clark, she achieved her "masterpieces" in her last two decades. Her involvement with the New York Dada 2 group and especially Marcel Duchamp was, in a sense, rediscovered in 1976 by another art historian, Francis M. Naumann. Naumann has since written several articles, usually concerning her drawings and her connections with the Arensberg Circle, and curated a 1997 bi-coastal retrospective and edited the book for it, held at the American Crafts Museum in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, close to her home of fifty years in Ojai, California. Two weeks after her death, the show opened again in Lake Worth, Florida, this time with twelve pieces donated to the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art by Mr. Lannan, South Florida art collector and philanthropist (Naumann, telephone interview, 26 March 1998). The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio presented the last show of the retrospective in June that year. Her celebrity before her death was evidenced by over 600 articles in newspapers and magazines (many repetitive) and by three videos documenting and evoking her work and life. Also, her life inspired, in muse-like fashion for both men and women, other works and artists: the various documentaries; a musical play Chocolate and Young Men (1997); the ceramic mask sculpture of Ojai potter, Ronda LaRue; the work of a former employee, David VanGilder, who claims to be her apprentice; the poems of Los Angeles poet Mira Adjani; in part, the Francois Truffaut film Jules and Jim (1961) based on the novel of the same name by her important friend, Henri-Pierre Roché, but certainly the novel Victor Roché was working on when he died; as well as James Cameron's Titanic (1997). She also inspired less "known" people to be creative in their lives. Beatrice Wood worked in several media. As a visual artist, she created often humorous sculptural forms in clay, quite different from her lustre ware. She drew, made lithographs of her drawings, and documented East Indian folk art in photographs. Drawn early to the performance arts as well, as a young woman she acted professionally in French in Montreal and New York in over sixty roles and danced, though not professionally, until she was at least eighty-three.