At any given moment in an artist’s career, her work can slide off into uncharted territory. Provoked in equal parts by the artist testing the limits of her comfort zone, of the work itself demanding a more thorough investigation, and by the unstoppable seepage of events external to the studio, the results can be startlingly fresh breakthroughs or utter duds.

“The Art of Betty Woodman” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art puts on display approximately 60 works resulting from one of these seismic artistic moments. These vases, paintings, and ceramic installations are Ms. Woodman’s rigorous attempts to renegotiate the terms of postwar studio pottery, and her relationship to it. As evidenced by this, her first American retrospective, she either has hit the mark or missed by miles.

Ms. Woodman’s shift came in the 1980s, when she shed the much-maligned skin of craftsperson and pushed her work formally and conceptually. During this period, she conflated issues relevant to painting, sculpture, installation, and architecture with those particular to studio pottery – or in her words, the process of “start[ing] to think of myself as an artist.” Taking cues from the Memphis Group’s radical rethinking of design concepts and the pattern and decoration movement’s ornamental abandonment, she shifted the thrust of her work away from the vessel as form to the vessel as idea.This is where things get interesting.

The sheer gusto evident in such large, messy, and cartoon-energized objects as “Tropical Vase #2” (1993) seems to imply that Ms. Woodman fully recognized that the ratio of failure to success was not on her side. Nevertheless, she obviously calculated that her successes were worth the risk.

Many artists have played this all-ornothing game. Fads and fashion aside, one major characteristic distinguishes those whose work survives: They knew how to edit the dreck. Ms. Woodman does not. Fortunately for her, whether due to size constraints or savvy curatorial skills, the retrospective at the Met is well pared down, focusing mainly on Ms. Woodman’s output since 1980 and allowing only a minimum of stinkers.

The exhibition is arranged across three rooms. Although some objects are confusingly shown with their decorative backs against a wall – or in some cases too high to notice – Ms. Woodman’s masterpiece, “Aeolian Pyramid” (2000), is smartly positioned for maximum impact. Composed of 35 individual vases on seven stepped tiers receding in number as they climb upward to form a pyramid, this piece achieves balance among color,sculptural space,and concepts of vessel.

Like a watchful chorus yawping some inaudible hymn, this complex piece highlights Ms. Woodman’s real strength. Her instinct for grouping communicative forms – often with a familial sensitivity akin to the industrial design grande dame Eva Zeisel – imbues individual vases with a clunky anthropomorphic wit. Surface drama exists in the odd tread marks, loping potter’s-wheel labyrinths, and highly jazzed yellow and black painting of fractured and dislocated vases. Part-towhole relationships exist in an exciting transience, sliding away at the moment of recognition.

The other side of Ms. Woodman’s gamble – her efforts to reconceive what can fall under the rubric of pottery, or even ceramic sculpture – is that when she fails, she fails hard. Often, as in “Still Life Vase #11” (1990), her paint-handling and use of color is confused, banking too much on the now-tired idea that a joyous freedom of action automatically translates into expressive goodness. Her efforts in softpaste porcelain at the Sevres factory are dead on arrival, lacking in sensitivity of both brush and form.

Ms. Woodman’s work is also on view alongside that of other major ceramic artists of the last 100 years at the UBS Art Gallery’s beautiful and comprehensive exhibition “Great Pots: The Vessel as Art, 1900-2000.”The focus of this show is on artists working within the parameters of traditional studio ceramics, concerning themselves with forging more localized innovations. Interestingly, Ms. Woodman’s pieces in this exhibition are easily glossed over and lack the visual and conceptual force found at the Met. Perhaps this illuminates the crux of her dilemma: Testing the limits of ceramics removes easy categorization and makes it hard for her work to be seen as pot, painting, or sculpture.

To accompany her retrospective, Ms. Woodman designed five large site-specific vases to hold the Lila Acheson Wallace flower arrangements in the Met’s Great Hall. Only an artist with a high level of precocious aplomb would be able to pull this off without suffering a complete nervous breakdown, and Ms. Woodman has it in spades. And this is exactly what allows her to weather the ups and downs of her singular career.

Until July 30 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).