If the story of Rose, the potter  in James Cameron’s “Titanic,” moved you, then you will love the life story – and the ceramic works – of the artist who helped inspire the character. Her name is Beatrice Wood  and her studio pottery is among the most collectible in the Western hemisphere.

Beatrice Wood lived to be 104. In her time, she cavorted with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché and became known at the Mama of Dada. She inspired “Jules and Jim,” was a follower of Krishnamurti, lived in Paris and then an intentional community in Southern California.

While Andy Warhol’s friends went  “to the opening of an envelope,” Wood loved nothing more than the opening  of a  kiln. The reason: her luster glazes were so experimental that she never knew exactly how they would come out.

Tea Set and Teapot

The definitive retrospective of Wood’s art opens at the Santa Monica Museum of Art on September 14 and runs through next spring. The Ceramics Fair in New York, one of the Americana  Week Shows, will surely have Beatrice Wood objects for sale.

Beatrice Wood did not discover her art until she was 40, and then it was an accident of hubris that led her to believe she could take a course and make a tea pot to match a set of china she had bought in Amsterdam.  Surprise. Wood was not what she called a natural craftsman. It took her quite some time to master throwing a pot on a wheel and glazes-that’s another story.

Blue luster glaze on a double neck bottle

Wood said that for a year  she did not understand what glazes were – “cream, water, solids, I didn’t know.”   She studied with the finest potters in California, many immigrants from war torn Europe. She developed her own techniques for luster – throwing mothballs or mustard into the kiln, even smoking it to manage the oxygen that would impact on the lusters. The results were stunning.

Wood’s molded ceramic art stands on its own as vignettes of the times. Some of it is  erotic, some feminist, some just fun.  Among the most famous is “Career Woman,” three women standing on a prone male. Wood crafted the piece for the anniversary of her 100th birthday.

Career Women-1990

Throughout, she was a compulsive diarist, committing to paper her thoughts and the recipes for the glazes.  The diaries are recently published and some are on view  at the Santa Monica show.

Beatrice Wood in her studio, c.1980. Photo: Bill Dow

 As for longevity, Wood attributed it to “chocolates and young men.” A sentiment much echoed in certain women’s magazines an on the reality TV show “Cougars.”

NOTE:  In the Islamic world, lusters were used to imitate gold and silver as early as the Ninth Century.

Part of Wood’s genius was that she made the elaborate acceptable in an era ruled by  form and function.  Collectors today have discovered that Wood was a woman and an artist ahead of her time.

Images courtesy of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  Article adapted from a forthcoming cover story in Antiques and the Arts Weekly by Regina Kolbe .

The New York Ceramics Fair opens  with a Preview on Thursday, January 17, 2012  at the Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street. It  has been called “The jewel in the crown of Americana Week.”