The
Whiney Museum’s exhibit of Jay DeFeo’s work is a tribute to an artist to gave everything to her vision. The centerpiece of the exhibit is of course, The Rose. DeFeo spent the years from 1958 – 1966 working in her Fillmore Street studio in San Francisco exclusively on her massive opus. DeFeo was so immersed in her work that, during that time, her teeth rotted out from a gum disease brought on by exposure to paint toxins. She was consumed by the painting, which began with the single idea that the work would have a center. After eight years of applying paint and then chiseling it away, sometimes all the way down to the supports, The Rose, upon completion, measured 7.5 x 11 feet and weighed almost a ton. |
Left) Jay DeFeo, The Rose: oil with wood and mica on canvas. Right) Jay DeFeo, After Image, 1970: acrylic and mixed media on paper.
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As she told Bill Berkson, DeFeo came to consider The
Rose to be “a
marriage of painting and sculpture”. She brought metallic powders into the mix
to give it a mica like shine; and there have been rumors of other additives,
from copper wire to beads and barrettes, hidden in the cement like layers. Of
course with a painting/sculpture of such magnitude there are bound to be
problems. The Rose’s
enormous size, weight, and fragility make it extremely difficult to move
around, let alone display in a museum. In the spring of 1969, when The Rose
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> was finally exhibited at the San
Francisco museum of art, it was found to be shedding debris on a daily basis.
The painting was quickly moved to a back wing of the San Francisco Art
Institute where it remained bolted to a wall and hidden from view until 1995,
when the Whitney Museum committed to acquiring it.
DeFeo died in 1989 of lung cancer, so she never got to see
her great painting resurrected. As a result of the long years spent working on The
Rose, its short
public display upon completion and its final exile, DeFeo’s reputation as an
artist languished: beyond the West Coast, her work was virtually unknown. This
is the first time since the Whitney Museum’s acquisition of DeFeo’s work that
she has been given a solo exhibition. The exhibit includes a number of DeFeo’s
other works and as exhibit organizer Dana Miller explained: "Although The
Rose was the culmination of more the seven years of work, it was not the
culmination of DeFeo’s career.” In all of DeFeo’s work you can see that she
liked to work with opposites – lights and dark geometry, gesture,
representation and abstraction. However the other work in the exhibit seems
dwarfed by The Rose,
as though everything before it was warming up and everything after was just an
afterthought. Even The Eyes, a beautiful and intense charcoal and pencil drawing that
was one of the works DeFeo did leading up to The Rose
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> seems to be a mere preparation for
what would come after.
One
of the most impressive things about The Rose
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is the way that it seems infused
with the artist’s spirit. When you are standing there, looking up at this mammoth
painting it, you feel almost as if you are considering a portal into another
dimension. DeFeo’s geometry is impressive, with a near perfect center and neat
lines flaring out until they deteriorate, and the painting seems to burst off
the canvas. The thick bodies of paint erupting from the center appear ready to
give birth at any moment to something that will be either grotesque or
shockingly pure. The coloration of The Rose
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is muted tones of gray white and
black, with the mica like inflections peeking through. The painting is so large
and intense that it ceases to look like a painting.
The
Rose was both an
autobiography and a parasitic double for DeFeo. It seems to have taken on a
life of its own, and consumed the artist. As her husband and fellow artist
Wally Hedrick remembers, “It was driving her crazy. She would line up these
radiating lines and get them where she wanted them and would come back the next
day and go berserk . . . Her hands would be covered with white lead. It killed
her.” DeFeo gave her all to The Rose; it is truly the work of an artist whose drive to follow
her own intuition and faith in her own creation is everywhere in evidence. |
