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Jay DeFeo, Apparition, 1956

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November 23, 2020

New Video on Jay DeFeo and her Generation

On November 17, 2020, Gagosian hosted a conversation on Jay DeFeo with Los Angeles

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1972

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November 16, 2020

Jay DeFeo: Selected Photographs – Marc Selwyn Fine Art Viewing Room

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents an online viewing room of Jay DeFeo's selected photographs

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Shoetree series), 1977

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November 13, 2020

Gagosian Quarterly – JAY DEFEO’S TRANSCENDENT OBJECTS

Gagosian Quarterly, November 12, 2020, "Jay DeFeo’s Transcendent Objects" By Alice Godwin

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled, c. 1962-71

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November 13, 2020

Jay DeFeo in The Brooklyn Rail

The Brooklyn Rail, November 11, 2020, "Orbits of Known and Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories /…

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Jay DeFeo, Lotus Eater No. 1, 1974

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November 13, 2020

Jay DeFeo’s Generation: A Conversation hosted by Gagosian

Join Gagosian for a conversation on Jay DeFeo, November 17, 2020, 11AM PST

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1971

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November 2, 2020

Catching Ideas in Process: Jay DeFeo’s Photography

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is hosting a panel discussion, November 18, 2020, 5:00…

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Jay DeFeo, Trap, 1972

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October 16, 2020

Jay DeFeo in SF Chronicle

SF Chronicle, Datebook, October 16, 2020, "Jay DeFeo’s artwork defied labels, which is why it’s…

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Gagosian Transcending Definition: Jay DeFeo in the 1970s installation view

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October 16, 2020

Jay DeFeo in Musée Magazine

Musée Magazine, October 15, 2020, "JAY DEFEO: TRANSCENDING DEFINITION" By Alessandra Schade

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled, c. 1965

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October 7, 2020

Orbits of Known & Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories/MATRIX 277

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the San Francisco Art…

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INSTAGRAM

As indicated by the title, "Untitled (Florence),"

As indicated by the title, "Untitled (Florence)," these two works on paper by DeFeo were inspired by her 1952 visit to the birthplace of Renaissance art and architecture.

[1/2: Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Florence) 1952, Tempera on paper, 29 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches (74.9 x 52.1 cm), JDF no. E1362. Collection of Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.; 2/2: Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Florence) 1952, Tempera on paper mounted on brown paper, 23 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches (59.7 x 36.8 cm), JDF no. E1208. Collection of Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #florence

We are excited to introduce a new series exploring

We are excited to introduce a new series exploring Jay DeFeo's travels and the ways in which these trips influenced her work over the years. We begin with DeFeo's visit to Florence in 1952.⁠⁠
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"I was doing, I think . . . the first work I had done that was my own – my own personal self away from influences, away from the university, and in a setting that was quite as idyllic and classic as this slide indicates. And of course, all of you know that Florence, as a city, is almost just like a sculptural manifestation of the early Renaissance. It's such a model for the history and that period in art." ⁠⁠
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- Jay DeFeo, slide lecture at University of California, Santa Cruz, May 10, 1989.⁠⁠
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[View of Florence, Italy, c. 1952. 35mm slide. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #florence

"The Jewel" is currently on view in "Modern Art" a

"The Jewel" is currently on view in "Modern Art" at @lacma. Learn more about the exhibition via link in bio.

[Installation view of "Modern Art," June 13, 2021–Ongoing at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Artwork from left to right: Franz Kline, "The Ballantine," 1958-1960; Mark Rothko, "White Center," 1957; Jay DeFeo, "The Jewel," 1959; Lee Krasner, "Desert Moon," 1955. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #lacma #modernart

"It was hauled into the San Francisco Art Institut

"It was hauled into the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, to a room with a slightly hollow, institutional feel, an impersonal place of long tables, brushed aluminum chairs, ungracious light, and sensible flooring. For such a bold painting, and a colossus, 'The Rose' spent many years there largely disregarded. Bolted to a wall of the McMillan Conference Room, it became a monumental witness to the mundane, a silent presence at faculty meetings, student bull sessions, symposia and slide lectures when the overhead lights were shut off and the room darkened and all human attention was turned to images of other paintings, other works by other artists."⁠⁠
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- Martha Sherrill, “The Story of The Rose,” Jay DeFeo and “The Rose”, J. Green and L. Levy, eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003) p. 29. ⁠⁠
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[Jay DeFeo, "The Rose" in the McMillan Conference Room at San Francisco Art Institute, 1972. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #sanfranciscoartinstitute #therose

"[Jay DeFeo] once said, “I addressed an early or

"[Jay DeFeo] once said, “I addressed an early orientation towards both discipline and freedom or spontaneity.” And 'The Rose' expresses this way in that she was both one of the great Abstract Expressionists and absolutely antithetical to abstract expressionism. In its setting in the middle of her bay window, it functioned as a site-specific piece or an installation, whose thick relief was picked out by the raking light of the side windows. In her several years engagement with making and unmaking the piece, with creating and destroying it, it relates to extended rituals and performance art, as well as ideas about process. It pushed painting into the dimension of sculpture. Reinvented what paint was for—transforming it from a brush and pigment medium into a raw visceral substance, and it played with destruction as a crucial aspect of creation– as much of the painting was carved away as was left on the canvas."⁠⁠
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- Rebecca Solnit, A Day with "The Rose" Symposium, San Francisco Art Institute, August 12, 1995⁠⁠
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[Burt Glinn, Portrait of Jay DeFeo working on "The Rose" (then titled "Deathrose"), 1960. © Magnum Photos, New York.]

#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #rebeccasolnit #therose

"[I]t changed continually – became a legendary i

"[I]t changed continually – became a legendary image – I remember a friend of mine who was in Hong Kong running into a merchant seaman talking about this fantastic painting that he had seen in San Francisco. It was reproduced in full page reproductions in Look magazine, and R alit s magazine which was a French magazine, and other places. And every time you saw a picture, it was different. It always had the central image with radiating lines, but it would sometimes have hard edges, sometimes the outer edges would sort of disappear, it would move in and out, it would be thicker, she would take the paint off. When she took the paint off, she would put it on the floor or put it on the footstool. So that when I went in a week ahead of the moving in 1965, the room was totally covered with oil paint – lumps of oil paint – which were kind of soft. Almost like you were walking on top of a whale. And the only illumination was the light from the windows on each side of this bay window. She worked in this room when the sun came up. When the sun went down she left the room. There was no artificial light. Every year she kept a Christmas tree – it was kept off into the corner of that room. She also mixed a fine powder with the paint. It was sort of like mica – it had a sparkly affect to it. So when you walked in you’d see these myriads of little sparkling dots like diamonds or stars there. It was very calming experience. It was clear that this was not just the painting, it was Jay herself, it was a ritual, a temple of sorts."⁠⁠
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- Bruce Conner, A Day with "The Rose" Symposium, San Francisco Art Institute, August 12, 1995⁠⁠
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["The Rose" (then titled "Deathrose"), baroque phase, with blurred figure and stool. c. 1962-63. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #bruceconner #sanfranciscoartinstitute #therose

"Part of the 1950s West Coast counterculture, DeFe

"Part of the 1950s West Coast counterculture, DeFeo was there when Allen Ginsberg read 'Howl' for the first time. (Her husband, the artist Wally Hedrick, was one of the founders of the Six Gallery, the site of 'Howl’s debut.) In some ways, her work echoed the Beats: 'The Rose,' in its making, is one continuous poem, bound up with the artist’s body no less than Ginsberg’s long poem, which takes the writer’s breath as the singular measure of its lines."⁠
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- Yevgeniya Traps, “Romance of The Rose: On Jay DeFeo,” The Paris Review, May 14, 2013⁠
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[Marty Sacco, Jay DeFeo in front of an early stage of "The Rose" (then titled "Deathrose"), 1961. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #yevgeniyatraps #theparisreview #allenginsberg #wallyhedrick

"Some time in 1958, Jay DeFeo propped against the

"Some time in 1958, Jay DeFeo propped against the sliding double door of her back-room studio on San⁠⁠ Francisco’s Fillmore Street a roughly seven-by-nine-foot canvas that bore the scraped-down green, pink⁠⁠ and orange marks of one of her discarded 'Mountain' series paintings and, under those, faint traces of⁠⁠ another, still earlier picture on the theme, prophetically enough, of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Onto⁠⁠ this surface she began loading piles of mostly white and dark gray oil paint in sharply divided, deeply⁠⁠ grooved segments radiating from a recessed point slightly more than four inches to the right of, and⁠⁠ slightly less than four above, the canvas’s center. (People who saw the work as it progressed have reported the presence of other colors -- reds, ocher and blue; of these, only a few flecks of very pale ocher remain visible on the face of the picture today.) DeFeo later told the archivist Paul Karlstrom that initially her⁠⁠ only guideline for the painting was 'an idea that had a center to it.' There was, she said, 'no notion of⁠⁠ ‘the rose’ about it.' Months would go by before DeFeo assigned even a working title to her picture;⁠⁠ finally, after eight years -- and an eternity’s worth of bedraggling vicissitude -- she called it 'The Rose.'"⁠⁠
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- Bill Berkson, “In the Heat of The Rose,” Art in America, March 1996⁠⁠
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[Jay DeFeo, Early version of "The Rose" (then titled "Deathrose"), 1958-1959. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #therose #billberkson #artinamerica

To close out National Rose Month, we will be shari

To close out National Rose Month, we will be sharing a series of quotes reflecting on DeFeo’s monumental work, “The Rose.”⁠⁠
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“‘Civilization,’ Gertrude Stein says, ‘begins with a rose.’ And also: ‘It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.’⁠⁠
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You understand what she means when you stand before Jay DeFeo’s massive painting 'The Rose,' a two-ton, twelve-feet-tall canvas sculpted in oil, wood, and mica, a bold burst of grisaille. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the work is part of the permanent collection, it hangs like an altarpiece, the focal point of a retrospective of DeFeo’s art.”⁠⁠
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- Yevgeniya Traps, “Romance of The Rose: On Jay DeFeo,” The Paris Review, May 14, 2013⁠⁠
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[Installation view of Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (February 28-June 2, 2013). From left to right: The Verónica, The Jewel, Incision, The Rose, and The Annunciation. 2013. Photography: Sheldon Collins May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]⁠⁠
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#jaydefeo #jaydefeofoundation #whitneymuseum @whitneymuseum #yevgeniyatraps #theparisreview #gertrudestein

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© 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation.

For personal and/or educational use only. Text and images of any works of visual art or any other images contained on this website may not be reproduced, downloaded or modified in any form without the express written permission of The Jay DeFeo Foundation. Nothing contained in this website shall be construed as conferring any license or right to any copyright on this website. All artwork, images, writings, and statements by Jay DeFeo © The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.