‘I was born in 1703,’ the artist Beatrice Wood has often told people, teasing them with her cheeky deadpan delivery and sidestepping an onslaught of questions about her illustrious past. All the marvellous stories associated with Wood’s life, she will readily admit, are indeed true: she completed finishing school – typical for a young lady of her era and class in New York – and attempted to escape the confinement of her family by moving to France. While living there, she did glimpse through a hedge to catch sight of Monet painting in the garden at Giverny, she studied drawing at the Academie Julien, and attended the scandalous premiere of Stavinsky’s La sacre du printemps. When the First World War began, Wood returned to the United States and soon found herself in the middle of the New York Dada movement…In 1928 she headed out West, leaving behind the last vestiges of her Edwardian upbringing. Source: Susan Morgan, “Reasonable and Unreasonable,” frieze 10, May 1993.