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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 15-MAY-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"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...

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