Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Marcel Duchamp’s New York apartment as artists, critics and collectors flocked to party and drink and exchange in pithy repartee. The Arensbergs were there, so was the writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim were there, too. In fact, all the coolest aesthetes were. I watched a lecture given by Dada scholar, Francis Naumann today, and forget being a fly, it made me want to whisk myself back to the 1920s and score an invitation to one of Duchamp’s shindigs. The lecture was on artist and potter, Beatrice Wood, and she alone would have been reason enough to join that milieu. Daring and groundbreaking, funny and smart, Wood was one of a kind. She lived to 105, if you can believe it, and broke with all the staid and stuffy traditions she’d been raised. She wore saris, ate Hershey’s chocolate bars, and made pottery that is as beautiful and bizarre as she seems to have been. Wood’s autobiography, I Shock Myself is top of my reading list. “My life is full of mistakes. They’re like pebbles that make a good road.”
