Oral history interview with Beatrice Wood, 1992 March 2

Overview

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Beatrice Wood’s 1992 interview with Paul Karlstrom, recorded on the eve of her 99th birthday, centers on why she makes art and how creativity is woven into everyday life. Wood muses philosophically that humans possess an innate creative energy that seeks expression in many forms—whether building a shelter on a desert island, setting a beautiful table, or making a pot. She does not sharply separate “high art” from domestic or folk creativity, arguing that the same inner energy can manifest in a great painting, a carefully arranged meal, or the choice of wallpaper. For her, beauty in one’s surroundings—houses, clothes, flowers, table settings—is deeply important and profoundly affects how we live.

She connects her own artistic drive to both temperament and circumstance. As a child she was “very eye-minded,” drawn to color and form, shuttled between boarding schools and European museums, and largely isolated from ordinary play with other children. In adulthood, Wood openly describes her art as a kind of sublimation: if she had been happily married, she believes her imaginative energy would have gone into loving and supporting a partner and family. Because her love affairs were often painful or disappointing, that surplus emotional and erotic energy flowed into drawing and ceramics. She repeatedly returns to the idea that much strong art grows out of unhappiness, blockage, and neurosis—difficult experiences that must go somewhere and may crystallize into creative work.

Wood recounts her accidental entry into pottery, beginning with an impractical desire to make a luster teapot to match antique plates she had bought for a future home. Realizing lusterware was far more complex than a weekend project, she started making small figures; when they sold during the Depression, she continued. Study with Glen Lukens and Otto and Gertrud Natzler deepened her technical understanding, and soon she found herself, almost against her original intentions, a professional potter. Throughout her career, she has kept two intertwined bodies of work: wheel-thrown bowls, which support her dealer and livelihood, and figurative pieces that freely express her ideas about love, sex, and the often disastrous relations between men and women. She insists the figures are made purely for her own pleasure and puzzling joy, approaching them “like a poor peasant” rather than a trained sculptor.

The figurative work, she acknowledges, is deeply autobiographical. Her figures often depict clothed men and semi-nude women, scenes tinged with humor, erotic tension, and social critique. She describes them as both a protest against prostitution and an admission that prostitution is, in her view, a “needed” social reality, reflecting the duality she sees everywhere in nature and in herself. Wood speaks candidly about being romantic and hurt in love, about laughing instead of collapsing under the agony of disappointment, and about using her art to transmute that pain. While she does not consciously aim to influence viewers or send moral messages, the figures are saturated with her views on sexual hypocrisy, the complexity of desire, and the absurdity of social norms around sex and fidelity.

Later in the interview, Wood reflects on fame, aging, and her place in the twentieth century. Though now a public figure—celebrated both for her long life and for her associations with Duchamp, Brancusi, the Arensbergs, and the early New York avant-garde—she claims little interest in how the public sees her. She describes herself as a loner, fiercely protective of solitude in the studio, more concerned with honesty, compassion, and curiosity than with reputation. Her sari, which has become part of her public image, grew simply from personal comfort and stubbornness about dressing as she likes. Looking back over a century, she worries about technology outpacing humanity, the failures of education, poverty and homelessness, and the ever-present danger of war and nuclear destruction. Yet she also celebrates the flowering of the American craft movement, the creativity of ordinary people, and the possibility that thoughtful education and nonviolence might still shift the world away from self-destruction.

Source: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution