SARAH CROWNER
Handbuilt Vessels
Legendary Dadaist and potter, Beatrice Wood led an enchanted, inspired life with a circle
of friends and lovers that included Edgar Varèse, Constantin Brancusi, Anaïs Nin, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Reginald Pole, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Joseph Stella, Japanese Geishas
and Native American mystics.
Born in San Francisco in 1893, Beatrice Wood lived in Paris in her late teens and early twenties, studying painting and performing small roles in theaters around the city. She later moved to
New York and became involved in the Dada scene at the time, co-publishing the arts journal
The Blind Man with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché (Jules and Jim was inspired, it is said, by the friendship and love triangle of Wood, Duchamp and Roché ). At a time when she scarcely would have recognized herself as a professional artist, Beatrice contributed a painting
to one of the most notorious exhibitions of the 20th century, the Society of the Independents’ exhibition in 1917, at the urging of Marcel. She was also a close friend of the art collectors, Walter and Louise Arensberg, visiting their West 67th Street salon for late night dinners and chess. An ill-fated relationship brought her to Montreal where she worked as a vaudeville actress for a short time. Her stifling parents, her first marital disappointment, and the practical pressures of surviving as an artist forced Beatrice to realize she needed to financially support herself if she wanted to have a truly independent life. So, she then moved to Los Angeles, took a ceramics course, and soon began supporting herself as a potter by the early 1930s. Later she moved up north to Ojai, California, a small town in a rustic valley full of orange groves and students of metaphysics. It is there she became interested in Eastern Philosophy and met Theosophian J. Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, who were tremendous influences on her. Beatrice continued to make pottery, travel, and write (a memoir and fiction works) until her death in 1998 at the age of 105.
This book is part of my ongoing investigation into Beatrice Wood’s inspiring example, including ceramic works and collage. Using clay, Beatrice’s chosen medium in later years, was one way
for me to reconstruct her past. Examining the books in her library in Ojai became another way for me to appreciate and catch a glimpse into the span of her life and art. What follows is a selective tour of Beatrice’s library.
-S.C.
The above text is the introduction to an artist’s book produced by Sarah Crowner to accompany her exhibition of ceramics and collages at the Nice & Fit Showroom. This group of artists, bohemians, intellectuals, bon-viveurs, vagabonds who lived between Paris and New York has exerted a lasting fascination on the art world especially as the conflicts, ennui and problems
of their quotidian lives have hidden behind the creases of historical distance. (I remember how deeply unsettling a talk by Teeny Duchamp at the Courtauld Institute of Art was as she demystified her circle of friends through anecdotal stories).
The hollow ceramic vessels in the exhibition are abstract portraits of Krishnamurti, Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, Anais Nin, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia among others. Unglazed, in various sizes and forms they recall the archaic purity of Cycladic figurines and
the majestic subtlety of Giorgio Morandi’s arrangements of objects. This new body of work
by Crowner, as well as the reproduction of her studio wall in Brooklyn at the gallery, serves
as a summons from one artist to another, or as an “invocation” to use a word recently employed by Jan Verwoert. In the closing paragraph of his “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to
Invocation in Contemporary Art” (2007) the author notes:
If we assume that horizon of our historical experience today is defined by the ambiguous influences and latent presence of the unresolved histories, the ghosts, of modernity, then an
act of appropriation that seeks to show what it means for something to mean something today must expose these unresolved moments of latent presence as they are, and that means first
of all, not to suggest their resolution in the moment of their exhibition. Appropriation then is about performing the unresolved by staging object, images or allegories that invoke the ghosts
of unclosed histories in a way that allows them to appear as ghosts and reveal the nature of the ambiguous presence.
For additional information and visuals please contact Helena Papadopoulos or Silvia Egger
at +4930 440 45976 and mail@niceandfitgallery.com. Gallery hours are: Tuesday to Saturday,
12-6pm and by appointment.
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