Jay DeFeo - The Rose

Hello everybody,

I want to introduce you to a female American artist who I deeply admire since I came across her beautiful work and way of expressing herself in a seminar last year. 

I made a connection between Jay DeFoe’s work The Rose and Georgia O’Keeffes The Black Iris.

Jay DeFeo standing in front of The Rose at 2322 Fillmore Street, 1959.
Source 

I find it very interesting that a high percentage of the North American art I looked at within my personal research is from the East Coast, with New York as its center. Last summer I had the chance to be part of a seminar at my home University in Cologne that focused on art created on the American West Coast with San Francisco and Los Angeles as the centers of creativity. After the Second World War, California had developed an extremely complex art scene away from the main centers of the art world which, less appreciated than its New York counterpart, nevertheless contributed to the development of influential artistic positions. In addition to painting and assemblage, this also concerned minimalist and conceptual approaches. 

Jay DeFeo working on "the Rose" at Fillmore Street, 1959

The American artist Jay DeFeo (1929 –1989) started influencing the world of art in the Bay Area in the late 1940s. She is often being associated with artists like Clyfford Still, David Park, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and many artists and poets of the 'Beat Generation'. Throughout her four decades of making art, DeFeo worked extensively making drawings, paintings on paper, photographs, photocopies, collages and photo collages.

Source 

Jay DeFeo: The Rose 1958-66, oil on canvas with wood and mica (327.3 x 234.3 x 27.9 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DeFeo is best known for her work The Rose, a piece that she worked on from 1958 to 1966 in her apartment in Fillmore Street, in San Francisco. You might say this monumental piece of art is as much a sculpture as it is a painting. Over ten and a half feet high and nearly a foot thick The Rose weights almost a ton. It is primarily thick oil paint on canvas. The artist would literally build up the oil paint to a thickness, wait for it to dry partially and then carve into it using a palette knife or trowel.

To concentrate completely on The Rose, DeFeo essentially withdrew from the art world for much of the 1960s, turning down offers of new gallery affiliations and solo exhibitions. When she started with The Rose in the late ‘50s, she did not know exactly where it was going. You might say that the process of crafting this piece was part of the artist's life during that period. The work went through many different phases and names: "There was a kind of archaic version at six months. (...) Then followed a very developed, geometric version, which gradually transformed itself into a much more organic expression. Curiously, this stage got thoroughly out of hand at one point (baroque), and I managed to pull it all the way back to the final 'classic' 'Rose.''' Article about DeFeo's Work (New York Times 2003)

The Rose being removed from DeFeo's studio, Image courtesy of ARS New York and Jay DeFeo foundation Source

Because of the work’s enormous size and rough surfaces, the Rose had to be removed from her apartment in 1966. The making of this piece, the atmosphere of its appearance and its removal from her apartment was documented in a short film by Bruce Conner entitled “The White Rose” (1967). sfMoMA: Excerpt of the movie by Bruce Conner

The Rose was first exhibited in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum and can now be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. I would love to go there someday, so if anyone gets news of cheap flights to New York, please let me know! ;-)

All the best,

Joana da Silva Duering N° 152336

This is a video which Leah Levy, Director and Trustee of The Jay DeFeo Trust; David A. Ross, Director of the Whitney from 1991-97; Lisa Phillips, Curator at the Whitney from 1988-99; and Dana Miller, the Curator of the Permanent Collection at the Whitney, discuss Jay DeFeo's monumental painting The Rose (1958-66), focusing on the Whitney's efforts to conserve the work.

Bibliography

- Elissa Auther, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press 2012

- Catherine Spencer, 'Coral and Lichen, Brains and Bowels: Jay DeFeo’s Hybrid Abstraction', Tate Papers, no.23, Spring 2015, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/23/coral-and-lichen-brains-and-bowels-jay-defeos-hybrid-abstraction, accessed 17 April 2018.

- Kimmelman, Michael. ART REVIEW; An Obsession, Now Excavated, New York Times Oct. 10 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/arts/art-review-an-obsession-now-excavated.html, Accessed 17 April 2018.

If you are more interested in Californian modernist Art in general, I highly recommend this book to you: 
Karlstrom, Paul J., editor On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900- 1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996.