‘Is it naive to believe that beauty makes life better?’

Walking into Betty Woodman’s loft in New York City is like stepping from a monochrome world into shocking Technicolor. Her spacious studio is full of raucously coloured paintings, to which she has attached flat pieces of fired clay and other threedimensional elements.

For a moment after entering, I feel dazzled and a little disorientated, as though I have walked into a picture by a great colourist such as Bonnard or Matisse. “I’ve tried to calm down my colour,” says Woodman, an 86-year-old ceramic artist. “But, somehow, it gets out of control. Do you want a cookie?”

She pours coffee from an Italian stove-top pot into cups that she produced in collaboration with the famous French porcelain manufacturer of Sèvres. Mine is decorated with golden polka dots and a splash of lime green.

“It’s a different experience than drinking out of a paper cup,” says Woodman, who in 2006 became the first living female artist to be honoured with a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “More intimate. I used to have this idea that beautiful things would make people’s lives better. I was naive, but I still believe that, I think.”

In the wake of Modernism, the pursuit of the straightforwardly beautiful can feel passé – an inadequate ideal for our fractured world. Yet, for six decades now, Woodman has strived to produce objects of exuberant, emphatic beauty, with little purpose beyond enriching the lives of those who encounter them.

“A lot of art is made to raise your consciousness about the horrors of the world,” she tells me. “But that isn’t what I’m doing. Beauty is a very important part of my work. I want to seduce myself.”

Anyone who saw Woodman’s recent exhibition at the ICA in London – her first solo show in the UK – will know exactly what she means: it featured her unusually shaped, rowdily painted pots, arranged in gorgeous tableaux. In recent years working with ceramics has become fashionable in contemporary art – from wellknown potter-artists such as Grayson Perry, to emerging talents, including Aaron Angell and Rachel Kneebone. As a result, Woodman is, suddenly, very much in vogue. “This fad for artists to use clay has given me much greater legitimacy in the art world,” she says.

Her latest project is a commission for the Liverpool Biennial. An imposing public artwork, it takes the form of an enormous fountain, 50ft across, mounted to the base of a Grade II listed art deco ventilation tower servicing a road tunnel under the River Mersey. Inspired by ancient Egyptian art, as well as baroque Italian architecture, Woodman fashioned the fountain’s scrolling, frieze-like forms in clay, before casting them in bronze.

“The plumbing will be on the surface, like a kind of drawing,” she explains. “It’s a counterpoint to the weight of the bronze. There should be this ballet of water.”

Acclaim has not come quickly to Woodman. “It’s been a long fight,” she tells me, with equanimity. “For years, my work wasn’t really looked at.”

The child of “free-thinking” second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants who loved classical music, Woodman “discovered” clay, aged 16, while attending a pottery class at high school in Newton, a suburb of Boston. “I

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