In her own charming, spirited, and readable style, Beatrice Wood tells us the story of her unorthodox life and her influence on 20th-century art. Rebellious, radical, and romantic, Wood (1893–1998) defied propriety to become a true national, and international, treasure. Her absorbing autobiography includes vintage documents and her own personal photos and sketches of her many famous friends and acquaintances in the art world. She became romantically involved with the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and offers rare glimpses into the lives of her circle, including key cultural figures like Constantin Brancusi, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anais Nin, and Krishnamurti. At age forty Wood studied ceramics and went on to become one of the major ceramists of the 20th century, working until her death at age 105. This captivating chance to enjoy Wood's rare charisma and spirit provides a better understanding of American art and the people who have shaped it.

I Shock Myself: Beatrice Wood, Career Woman of Art

Wood, Beatrice

Religion & Spirituality

Schiffer Craft

One of America's acclaimed ceramicists, Beatrice Wood shares the intriguing details of her unconventional life in 'I Shock Myself'. With candour and insight, she recollects nearly ten decades of world-shaking events, heart breaking romances, and artistic achievement.

I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood

Chronicle Books+

San Francisco 1988 Chronicle. Edited by Lindsay Smith. California artist, actress and potter. 4to., 181pp., photo illustrations, wraps. VG.

Beatrice Wood's Life has been extraordinary in every way, from earliest childhood, when her dominating Victorian mother realized she "wasn't like the rest of them," to her productive life at ninety-five in California's Ojiai Valley. Rebellious, radical and romantic, Beatrice Wood was determined to be an artist. She fled to Paris for several bohemian seasons as a painter and actress, then returned to New York where she fell into the loving clutches of two Frenchmen: Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, and Marcel Duchamp, the iconoclastic Dadaist. Her promising youth was followed by a disastrous marriage, financial woes and a debilitating physical affliction; but in 1933, at the age of forty, she discovered the passion that would change her life: pottery. Now one of America's acclaimed ceramicists, Beatrice Wood shares the intriguing details of her unconventional life in I Shock Myself. With candor and insight, she recollects nearly ten decades of world shaking events, heart breaking romances, and artistic achievement.

I shock myself: The autobiography of Beatrice Wood

Travel

United States

Dillingham Press

Touching Certain Things

M G M Pr

When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

Debating American Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde

Arts & Photography

WEBER, MAX

Balken, Debra Bricker

Stella, Joseph

Dove, Arthur

Bochner, Jay

Demuth, Charles

De Zayas, Marius

Davis,Stuart

Covert, John

Crotti, Jean

Schamberg, Morton

Sheeler, Charles

Stettheimer, Florine

Storrs, John

History & Criticism

D.A.P./American Federation of Arts

Beatrice Wood turned to ceramics late in life at age 40, but still managed to work behind a potter's wheel for nearly 65 years. Influenced by the Dada movement, her lusterware pottery, with its rich and decadent palette of shimmering gold and silver, vindian greens, incandescent pinks, and intense purples, has captivated generations of collectors. Gilded Vessel is not so much a biography as a celebration of the life and ceramic artistry of Beatrice Wood. Glorious color pictures reveal the iridescent beauty of her pottery, while black-and-white photographs document the life, loves and luster, of a woman New York Times Magazine hailed as one of the great lives of the 20th century.

Gilded Vessel: The Lustrous Life and Art of Beatrice Wood

CLARK, Garth

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Guild

Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man relates the story of the triangular relationship between Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, told in the words of two of its protagonists; and also reprints in facsimile the Dadaist magazine they produced together in New York in 1917: The Blind Man. The principal text is the first English translation of Roché’s novel Victor, an account of his friendship with Duchamp (nicknamed Victor by his close friends in those days). Although unfinished, Roché’s text offers a unique account of New York Dada, all of whose principal characters and events make an appearance: Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, the Arensbergs and their soirées, the Blind Man’s Ball and the scandal of Duchamp’s "Fountain" at the Independents exhibition, a pivotal moment in modern art. The novel offers interesting insights into the sexual politics of the period, when a woman could be arrested or blackmailed for spending the night with a man to whom she was not married. Roché, a lifelong friend of Duchamp, appears to have been something of a devotee of triangular relationships, and went on to write a more famous novel on the topic (also autobiographical), Jules et Jim--later made into a film by François Truffaut. Beatrice Wood’s account of these events is taken from her memoirs; she went on to become a celebrated ceramicist, dying in 1998 aged 105. The introduction and commentary is by Dawn Ades, the well-known scholar of Dada and Surrealism.

Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man: Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood

DUCHAMP, MARCEL

Roché, Henri-Pierre

Atlas Press

Account of an American ceramist's journey through India.

33rd Wife of a Maharajah: A Love Affair in India

Biographies & Memoirs

Travelers & Explorers

South Asia Books

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