Ms. Woodman's decision to become a potter goes back to her teenage years, when she took a high school class and became fascinated with the magic of ceramic glaze, which turned a piece from dull to brilliant when fired in a kiln. She studied ceramics at the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University, where her first real effort was a custard cup made to fulfill the school's requirement that students create a production item. Her two-year course over, in the early 1950's she sojourned in Italy, where she fell headlong in love with Mediterranean art. In its more Baroque aspects it seems to have provided the basic impetus for her work ever since, no matter how far-flung her inspirations.
By 1975 her painterly style was establishing itself, cued partly by the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 70's, whose participants (including her husband, George Woodman, then a painter) explored a wide range of art from every era. That year she produced what is probably her most popular and original creation, the anime pillow pitcher, whose form she invented. It was made using two cylindrical pots, each pinched together at one end, then joined mouth to mouth at the other, the joint concealed by a strap of clay leading to a traditional pitcher spout and handle. She still makes them from time to time.
Not meant for function, the generous, puffy shape provides a natural painting surface, exemplified in ''Tang Pillow Pitcher'' (1981), whose glazed white earthenware face is drippily splotched with dark green and rust-colored paint in Ms. Woodman's broad stroke. Its deliberately casual manner is perhaps influenced by Abstract Expressionism as well as by exposure to Italian ceramics. What makes her work so engaging is the very looseness of her approach to shape and paint application, refreshingly different from the tight intricacies of more punctilious ceramists, including some of her contemporaries.
This approach is seen at its best in her two-sided works in the form of double- or triple-related figures that play on the pot's relationship to the body. Essentially flat cutout pieces that flange off a columnar base, they are painted with different images on front and back, so that you can't say you've really seen them without looking on both sides. In ''The Ming Sisters'' (2003), a monumental triptych inspired by Japanese and Korean arts and crafts, each piece is cut out in a different but similar configuration. They stand coquettishly in a row, their bright white gowns adorned with childlike floral motifs in lively colors on one side, a gleefully different set of patterns on the reverse. Here, too, the sharply outlined spaces between the figures, ghostly gray intrusions, play an important role in the presentation of the figures.
''Aeolian Pyramid'' (2000) dominates the exhibition in a knockout arrangement of several dozen flat vase cutouts in pale pink earthenware stamped with tiny raised designs. Each is of a slightly different shape; each is also adorned with painted Greek motifs in black and yellow. Their setup in a large, striking pyramid makes a bravura stage set for this scintillating show.
As a bonus, Ms. Woodman has done five ebullient substitutes for the pompous urns in the Met's Great Hall that hold the floral arrangements refreshed weekly there. It would be nice if the Met got to keep them.
