DECORATION MYTHS.(Metropolitan Museum's Betty Woodman retrospective)

"Too Matissey," a woman complained while viewing the spectacular Betty Woodman retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, a show that, on the day that I saw it, piqued a good deal of chat among strangers. The profusion of ceramic vessels and abstracted images of vessels, ranging from teacups to vast installations, shocks with aggressive forms and blazing colors, and its obvious, hellbent determination to please solicits opinion. None of the work is too Matisse-like. Though the master of color is very much evoked, nothing could less reflect his ideal that art should be like a good armchair than Woodman's rough-and-tumble theatricality. The show can put you in mind, too, of Picasso, Miro, and Joan Mitchell, and of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism--elements of modernity that, over a half-century career, Woodman has thoroughly rethought in low-fired clay. At the age of seventy-six, she is beyond original, all the way to sui generis. She has been well known in art circles since the nineteen-seventies, when her work was associated (incorrectly but advantageously, given the art world's chronic disdain for anything that smacks of "craft") with a briefly fashionable movement called Pattern and Decoration. 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. An approving critic, on this occasion, is tasked with discovering significant questions to which Woodman's art is the right answer. How can something be important that seems, at first blush, so capricious?

Start in the Met's entrance hall, where the massive, banal urns that are routinely filled with bouquets of fresh flowers have been replaced, for now, with Woodmans: cylindrical vases fronted with flat, jaggedly cut out slabs bearing glazed and painted, shattered representations of vase forms. When I was there (the arrangements change, week to week), masses of cherry blossoms, lilies, and subtly accenting blue-green eucalyptus complemented such opulent hues as, in a vase titled "Portugal," an indigo like an organ chord, at once rumbling and clarion. It's only decor, but what decor! I found myself reflecting, glumly, on the timid or arch character of most decoration today. Since decoration is art that is meant not to be looked at directly but to be taken in peripherally, Woodman's work may seem overqualified, in its peremptory splendors. But, in effect, the work dreams of a world in which beautiful invention is to be expected, as an aesthetic civil right. It's not Woodman's fault that the rest of the culture won't perform at her level--though the rest of the Met certainly does. Leaving the show, I wandered into the museum's collections of Italian Renaissance and ancient Greek pottery with eyes pried open. Those pieces were made not to be pedestalled, as treasures, but to enhance lived protocols of perception and feeling. I also checked in with Matisse. Woodman is indeed a comparable colorist. Her conjunctions of high-keyed and earthen shades, often with swift black lines and chalk-white grounds, first startle, then gladden. She lacks Matisse's Arcadian harmony--her color jangles--but this is not a failure so much as an authentic note of an American sensibility too restless and pragmatic to dawdle in regions of calme, luxe, et volupte.

Born Elizabeth Abrahams, Woodman became a potter at an early age, in her home town of Newton, Massachusetts, where her father worked for a supermarket and her mother for Jewish charities. She was enchanted by the alchemy of glazes: drab when brushed on, brilliant when they came out of the kiln. In 1948, she entered the celebrated ceramics program of Alfred University, in western New York, where she absorbed--but always resisted--the gospel of Japanese-influenced functionalism preached by the Englishman Bernard Leach, who was then preeminent in the field. While teaching pottery two years later, in Boston, she met her future husband, the painter and photographer George Woodman, who regularly decorated her pots, until she took over that job, in the early seventies. They lived in Boulder, Colorado, where George taught, and they had two children. They moved to New York in 1980. She joined the Max ...