New York
Betty Woodman
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
April 25–July 30, 2006
Curated by Jane Adlin
Ancient as culture itself, the clay vessel is a simple but endlessly mutable form, which New York– and Italy-based painter and sculptor Betty Woodman has explored in ways that fuse its various historical incarnationsfrom the utilitarian to the art-historicalreferencing Tang Dynasty objects, Sèvres porcelains, Greek sculpture, Japanese kimono patterns, and paintings by Matisse and Picasso. This exhibition, her first retrospective in the United States, spans Woodman’s fifty-year career by way of some seventy drawings, paintings, wall reliefs, and ceramicslike usable (albeit fantastical) teacups, “Pillow Pitchers” (two fused cylinders with pinched ends), and five large urns commissioned for the Metropolitan’s Great Hall. The show is accompanied by a monograph on the artist, with essays by critics Arthur Danto, Janet Koplos, and Barry Schwabsky.