OCTOBER COVER STORY: While not a household name, Betty Woodman is arguably the most original American ceramic artist of our lifetime

I first encountered Betty Woodman’s work at the Denver Art Museum a couple of years ago – a big, gorgeous installation that I now recall (imperfectly, I’m sure) as a room filled with a garden of glazed clay elements, a shower of deep, bright flowery ceramic forms that occupied walls and floor. I raced to the description on the wall. “Wow! Who’s Betty Woodman?” My companion stopped short for a second, “You mean, you’d never …?”

Researching this story, I remember my friend’s response to my ignorance of someone I now understand to be probably the most famous living artist working with ceramics. In fact, Betty Woodman is one of the most significant artists of her generation, period. The list of her exhibitions, collections and honors is a few pages long. It includes a prestigious 70-piece solo retrospective held April 25 to July 30 of last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with an accompanying catalog containing essays by major critics such as Arthur Danto.

While she works mostly with clay thrown on a wheel, glazed and low-fired in a kiln, Woodman is not just a ceramicist. Her work defies easy categorization, although it invites comparisons to Matisse and Jasper Johns – a reverent reflection of the station she has achieved within the fine-art hierarchy. Concurrent with her Met show, Max Protetch – the gallery with which Woodman has had a long association – mounted another Woodman retrospective.

In addition to paintings and sculptures, the Protetch Gallery is known for handling architecture, design, functional art, video and other works that taunt the idea of pigeon-holed classification. In a Protetch overview of the artist, Woodman is described as one whose work “comes out of the history of the vessel and shares many concerns with painting and sculpture.” In a laudatory New Yorker review of the Protetch exhibition, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “A dearth of wider fame is due to the strangeness of her project, which entails a simultaneous emphasis on painting and sculpture in a disrespected medium, with references to arcane Mediterranean and Asian decorative traditions.”

Betty Woodman’s vases and vessels, pillow pitchers, and large installations that combine two- and three-dimensional pieces bespeak an artist at ease with an enormous frame of formal and historical references that are alluded to, or departed from, with cheery familiarity, but not irreverence. She is, likewise, at obvious ease with clay and its forms (and the forms she likes to carve out of the spaces between clay elements), surfaces and glazes, and with the paint she sometimes applies later. Her colors – and remember, the glazes applied before firing can’t be seen except in test samples until they come out of the kiln – are wonderfully rich, bright or deeply earthy.

If Woodman’s career ascent seems to have left in the dust those redundant debates about ceramics as a legitimate fine-art medium versus a craft, it should not be assumed that approval was attained effortlessly. Early on, Woodman experienced the marginalization of ceramics from the larger art world – what she describes as a complete lack of respect accorded women who worked with pottery. “We were just looked upon as the bottom of the barrel, really.” Even within the feminist art movement of the 1970s, ceramics was a field sometimes disdained because of its domestic associations. Despite the difficulties, Woodman persevered and as her work evolved. Recognition and success inevitably followed.

Speaking by telephone from her house in the hills above Florence, Italy, Woodman spoke of her work with disarming modesty. Asked about this writer’s perception of her as a supremely confident and surefooted artist, she answered slowly “Well, I have been doing this since I was sixteen, when I took my first pottery class, and I knew then that this was my medium. And, yes, I know what I’m doing, at this point. But I have certainly struggled to find my way, and that is perhaps reflected more in my earlier pieces. I’ve been making things out of clay for more than 60 years. To me, it’s like walking.”

Betty Woodman, whose maiden name is Elizabeth Abrahams, was born in 1930 in Norwalk, Connecticut. She took her first pottery class in high school. In 1948, she enrolled in Alfred University’s acclaimed School for American Craftsmen. She met her husband, the painter and photographer George Woodman, in 1950. The couple lived in Albuquerque, N.M., and Boulder, Colo., and raised two children, also artists. The Woodmans have long divided their time between the Italian farmhouse and a loft in Manhattan. Betty maintains a studio at each of the residences.
She has studio assistants in New York, but none in Italy. “I do almost all of the physical work by myself,” she said. “If an assistant has the skill to wedge the clay (preparing it for use by kneading it), I sometimes delegate that task. But I make all the forms myself, on the wheel, and fire them myself. It’s a lot of hard physical work.”

Perhaps because Woodman is venerated by critics who discuss her work in the loftiest academic prose, who deconstruct her intentions as though her body of work had been carefully conceived and planned out, it was surprising to hear her say that she does not consider herself a cerebral artist or a big planner, but rather one who responds spontaneously to influences that cross her path and serve as touchstones. Those influences might include a type of marble she looked at in a baroque cathedral in Rome, or a Gauguin painting whose colors she absorbed and archived in her mind’s eye. “Of course I make decisions, but they tend to be made in the process of working, rather than in a planning stage,” she explained.

During our conversation, Woodman described a work in process that was inspired by a Matisse painting of two figures, filled with blues that held her gaze. Something of that painting will be incorporated into this new piece, perhaps in an oblique way. “It’s about working from some kind of storage of memories and associations, as with the Matisse painting, a dialogue which amuses me – but if it gets too literal, too close to the source, I am in trouble.”

Woodman’s sense of spontaneity has led to important choices in what the artist describes a little wearily as “questions of materiality.” In 1990, while working on a piece later acquired by the Whitney Museum, Woodman found herself dissatisfied with the glazed decoration. “George gave me some paint, and that was the first time I painted on a piece after it was fired,” Woodman explained. “That was sort of a taboo in ceramics, and it was a little scary at first.” For years thereafter, Woodman would use lacquer, the kind used for painting models, because it was glossy. Last year, in the same spirit of openness to new materials and techniques, she switched to Golden brand liquid acrylic paint after seeing a piece of hers repaired this way by a ceramics museum conservator in Geneva.

Among the influences Woodman took from Asian ceramics was the notion that if a piece were broken, it could be repaired in a way that made it more interesting, as opposed to being rendered unusable scrap. “I was aware of this Oriental tradition of mending pottery (whereby) sometimes they would pour gold leaf into a crack, making it more precious. As my works became larger and more complicated and fragmented, I didn’t have the luxury of re-making a broken piece, so I’d put it back together.” These mends are sometimes obvious in the finished product. “I feel that whatever I’m doing, however I’m handling the materials, if it works for me aesthetically, then it’s right for the piece.”

Now in her late seventies, Woodman continues to challenge herself as an artist, and with youthful vigor. Currently in the works is a commissioned bronze wall fountain, 90 feet long and partly made by reusing casts of her previously made bronze benches. “In Rome I discovered a 1st century B.C. Roman painting of a long corridor that I used as the basis for organizing this piece geometrically. It has support columns every 15 feet, and I’ve borrowed that for the fountain.”

Following our interview, Betty Woodman wrote to clarify something. “In all that discussion of how much physical work it is, I do not want the art to look like it was a lot of work,” she said. “I want it to look as if it just flowed out, that the viewer should be able to see what it is, not how much skill or hard work it takes to make something. That kind of work is not what I respond to, nor what I aspire to.”

A sense of effort, of hard labor, is the antithesis of what one experiences upon encountering Woodman’s work. In an installation such as House of the South (see illustration) – with its trio of seated vases and parade of wall-mounted vessel-forms that seem to release plumes of thought, ribbons of sound, streamers of color – one sees only the joyous result of a gifted hand quite capable of making hard clay flutter and spout.