"I was engaged to be married to a jerk."

Thus begins one of Beatrice Wood’s more colorfully succinct renditions of events she probably had related countless times. The occasion was an interview on March 2, 1992, a day before her 99th birthday, and Wood was explaining how she had discovered the craft of pottery purely by accident.

Paradoxically, it was a gesture toward domesticity that led Wood to realize her full potential as an artist. On a 1930 trip to Europe with a friend, she bought six luster-glazed plates in Haarlem, a little something for the household she would soon set up with the avocado farmer she didn’t love. But Wood’s higher instinct triumphed: Upon her return to Los Angeles she ended the engagement and soon afterward embarked on a love affair that would define the next 60-odd years of her life. Wanting a teapot to match the dishes she had purchased in the Netherlands but finding none on Depression-era shelves, she took a pottery class at Hollywood High School, in 1933, and quickly realized just how much she had to learn.

Wood’s eventual mastery of the unpredictable luster glazes, with their iridescent jewel tones, became a signature element of her work. But she also is known for the playful, convention-flouting figurative pieces that she affectionately called her "sophisticated primitives"—an apt description of all her pottery, which more often than not eschews delicacy and symmetry for something more robust and rough-hewn.

"She could throw very, very well, but there was a crudeness, sometimes, to her pieces, just because she had gotten to the place where it didn’t have to be the most perfect vessel in the world to her," says Frank Maraschiello, vice president and director of the 20th-century decorative arts department at Bonhams. "It was about the whole energy of the piece: the shape, the decoration and the glaze."

And for many collectors, it is also about the life that infuses those pieces—the phenomenal 105 years of creativity and exploration, of globe-trotting and love stories, that took her from theater roles with the French National Repertory Theatre in New York to the leading edge of the "anti-art" Dada movement to the studios in Southern California’s Ojai Valley where, for five decades, she devoted herself to the kiln.

As second acts go, Wood wrote enough of her own for several lifetimes. Dubbed the Mama of Dada, she was well into her 80s when her star truly rose in the art world. Along the way, her friends included the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, with whom she once played Monopoly (he enjoyed the game more than she did); filmmaker James Cameron, who modeled the character of Old Rose in Titanic after her; and memoirist Anais Nin, who encouraged Wood to write the autobiography that was eventually published as I Shock Myself.

Long before she delved into the world of clay and the wheel at age 40, Wood was an actress and a painter, moving in World War I-era avant-garde circles, to the profound disappointment of her well-to-do parents. The bohemian impulse had inspired her early, and its collision with the Victorian sensibility of her private-school upbringing—a friction that defined her wrought relationship with her status-conscious mother—would remain a subject of Wood’s work throughout her career."Part of her wonderful rebellion was reacting to what she was expected to be," says collector Forrest Merrill, "but I can’t believe that there’s not a part of her that always remained very upper-upper-middle-class."

The very titles of some of her figurative pieces—Chez Fifi, Shall We?, Madame Lola’s Pleasure Palace, Father Hagerty and His Candy Bars—slyly mock propriety. Of the "naughty" scenes of prostitutes and bordellos that she began making in the early 1970s, Wood told a filmmaker, "I think this is my revenge, to get rid of my Puritanism." But she also said, in her 1985 autobiography, that they provided "a release from my shock over discovering Roché had slept with so many women."

She was referring to French writer Henri-Pierre Roché, the first great love of her life, after an unhappy and unconsummated first marriage; Wood famously said, "I never made love to the men I married, and I did not marry the men I loved." But she did travel in heady company, with artists and intellectuals. Along with Roché, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Edgar Varèse and Man Ray, she was a regular at the Manhattan salons of Louise and Walter Arensberg, who were amassing a monumental collection of modern art.

Wood was no mere hanger-on. With Roché and Duchamp, she created the short-lived Dada magazine The Blind Man. (Their love triangle would serve as the inspiration for Roché’s novel Jules et Jim, although in its pages Wood found only a passing resemblance to their younger selves.) Her contribution to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists show at Grand Central Palace in New York, an assemblage ungrammatically titled Un peut d’eau dans du savon, brought her notoriety for its bold, if stylized, depiction of female sexuality: To her painting of a woman’s naked torso she attached a strategically placed shell-shaped soap.

She never abandoned the goddess-meets-modernism sense of freedom and experimentation that animated her early works on paper. Martin Gewirtz, who was director of the Beatrice Wood Studio from 1999 to 2005, recalls a drawing she donated to a 1996 auction for the Ojai Studio Artists Tour. "They were simple stick figures, but with anatomy," he says with a laugh. After the city requested a more family-friendly version, he adds, "She apparently just laughed and redid the drawing."

A theatrical desire to shock, tempered with a generosity of spirit, characterized Wood’s work and personality. She was, according to Merrill, an entertainer "in the best sense of the word."

Merrill, a specialist in mid-century California crafts whose collection is considered one of the most important of its kind, met Wood at her Ojai studio. "She was very intelligent. Everything she said, she said in complete sentences with beautiful diction, great rhythm and phrasing," he says. "She created her persona. Beautifully."

"She definitely played a role," agrees Kevin Wallace, director of the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, which houses the artist’s last studio and a permanent collection of her work, and is run by the nonprofit, the Happy Valley Foundation. "She was a woman of incredible intelligence and depth, but I think she knew that it was easier for her to do what she did within the context of a certain role."Such self-mythologizing can be a tiring endeavor, but Wallace believes that for Beato—as she came to be known after a friend’s young daughter couldn’t quite pronounce her name—it was a source of energy. "Philosophically speaking, she was in a really good place," Wallace says. "I don’t think Beato was somebody who spent much time being upset with herself or upset with other people or negative at all."

A provocateur, a romantic and a lifelong flirt, Wood was also a devoted student of nonviolence, as embodied in the philosophies of Krishnamurti and the progressive metaphysics of the Theosophical Society. Compounding this rich multiplicity of traits and interests were the sometimes- contradictory narratives she offered— carrying that Dada impulse through to the end. "My belief is no one on the planet would ever be able to write the definitive biography of her," says Gewirtz.

"She lived a full, unconventional and wonderful life," Maraschiello says, "and she’s celebrated for being Beatrice Wood as much as she’s celebrated for being a potter."

But for all her knack as a rule-breaker and a larger-than-life character, in her saris and oversize bangles, Wood was a prolific and disciplined artist, providing new work for gallery shows each year in the latter part of her career. "She got up in the morning and must have gone to work, like many confident craftspeople do," Merrill says. "It’s not a matter of, ‘I wonder if I’m in the mood to go to work and make something today.’"

Within the California studio crafts movement, which drew upon European and Asian traditions and emphasized materials and simplicity, Wood learned from the best. She studied with Glen Lukens at the University of Southern California and then with the exacting Otto and Gertrud Natzler, Viennese émigrés and leading practitioners of the ceramic arts. It was an important mentorship for Wood, but it ended badly, much to her sorrow. In another couple, Otto and Vivika Heino, she found a more lasting friendship, and Otto Heino—who at 94 still works 17-hour days—taught her to make the luster glazes that had first drawn her to pottery.

By experimenting with luster effects (the reaction of metallic salts in reduction firing, which decreases the amount of oxygen in the kiln), Wood joked that she could indulge her gambling instincts. Garth Clark, arguably her most important dealer, was particularly interested in her luster pieces. "Beatrice was our first artist, and we represented her from 87 to 105 years of age," says Mark Del Vecchio, who partnered with Clark in the Garth Clark Gallery, which opened in Los Angeles in 1981, later moved to New York and now functions as a web-based, private dealer.

"Garth Clark sort of made her in a way, but she also made the Garth Clark Gallery," Wallace says. "It was mutually beneficial."

She had been working and selling steadily, but the partnership with the gallery helped propel her career to a new level. That resurgence began in the late 1970s when art historian Francis Naumann sought Wood’s early drawings and became a proponent of her figures and narrative earthenware.

Naumann organized a 1989–90 Oakland Museum exhibition titled Intimate Appeal, the first show devoted solely to her figurative art. In the catalogue, Wood wrote, "the tribal arts of India made me determined to continue making my little figures, which I call ‘sophisticated primitives,’ in an unschooled manner. For it is fun in this absorbing technical age to work simply from the heart, and in my case to laugh at men’s and women’s relationships."Drawing upon her theatrical flair and Dada sense of humor, Wood’s figurative pieces filter personal experience and social commentary through a folk-art lens. Collectors tend to prefer either the figural works or the pots. But some of Wood’s most compelling pieces, such as the chalices that look like long-buried antiquities, combine lusterware vessels and figurative elements. Fusing primitive and modern, Wallace says, her pottery strikes a singular vein that courses through history.

As for the sculptural figures, Wood had been making them for many years—such large-scale, major pieces as Settling the Middle East Question date from the late ’50s—but mainly for her own amusement. "They made her laugh," Gewirtz says. "She didn’t care whether they sold."

Yet her auction record was achieved by a figurative piece: One of the whimsical bordello scenes, of which she made numerous variations, sold for $19,200 in 2005. Maraschiello notes that another such scene brought $17,000 in the late ’90s at Bonhams & Butterfields, while a similar but less well-glazed piece brought about $8,500 last year.

Her finest luster-glaze pieces, most of which stand less than 10 inches tall, continue to command the high end of the market and usually exceed their auction estimates. Of the work that Garth Clark is currently handling, prices range $3,000–90,000. Bonhams sold a chalice in 2001 for $16,800—$10,000 above its estimate, while two luster bottles brought three times as much.

"About half of her output was smaller vessels under 8 inches and the other half is divided up into major vessels, sculptures and tiles," says Del Vecchio, who notes that Wood’s values have grown along with her collector base.

Gewirtz, who developed a secondary-market source of revenue for the Happy Valley Foundation after collectors came forward with pieces for resale, has seen the market veer toward new collectors. While handling sales of Wood’s bequest, he kept in mind the sign she posted outside her first Ojai studio, proclaiming prices "reasonable and unreasonable."

She was "the ultimate soft sell," Merrill says. On a fall day at the Beatrice Wood Center, the collector recalled his first visit to her studio. "She’d just returned from India, and she decided that I should buy a piece of Indian jewelry. It took about a half-hour for me to evidence the fact that I was not about to buy a piece of clunky silver jewelry and that I wanted to buy a piece of pottery. And I prevailed," he adds with a smile. "I think she was a very shrewd saleswoman. Just the force of her personality made everything seem not precious but valuable."

Ten years after her death at 105, that life force remains inseparable from Wood’s work. Her vivacious self-creation is at once quintessentially Californian and beyond categorization—ancient and modern, Victorian and bohemian, timeless. Turning her back on that avocado farm, she stepped more fully, and joyously, into herself.

Debate might persist over the quality of her skills, but for savvy collectors the ideal Beato chalice has, as Gewirtz puts it, "a little tilt and a glaze skip." As Wood said, with elegant understatement, in her autobiography, "In my lack of technical knowledge, I pursued something that was my own."Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, Ojai, Calif.
805.646.3381 beatricewood.com

Beatrice Wood Fine Pottery & Works on Paper, Ojai, Calif.
805.798.1386 beatricewoodart.com

Garth Clark Gallery, New York and Los Angeles
212.246.2205 garthclark.com

Rago Arts & Auction Center, Lambertville, N.J.
609.397.9374 ragoarts.com