Download PDF Version Revolt Magazine, Volume 1 Issue No.4

BETWEEN DESTINATIONS:
THE ROSE
UNEARTHED
BY RANDEE SILV
After circling through the 4th floor galleries at the
Whitney Museum, I found myself returning to the
same exact spot at Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective
(February 28 - June 2, 2013). It was like being
caught in a visual net as my glance slightly turned
in both directions. I couldn’t move as I stood there
between DeFeo’s seven foot wide hypnotic graphite
on paper, The Eyes (1958), and the monumental,
nearly one ton, The Rose (1958-66), nestled
in the small sanctuary that the museum had
designed to emulate the sunlight as it streamed
into her Fillmore Street studio. DeFeo always felt
that this drawing had something of a “prophetic
or visionary meaning,” and it was through these
eyes that her works to come would be envisioned.
Her desire was that some day these two pieces
would be shown together. I could almost hear them
conversing. Unexpectedly, I was drawn in.
Jay DeFeo was a painter among the ‘50s San
Francisco scene of artists, poets and jazz
musicians. After graduating from the University of
California at Berkeley with a master’s degree, she
was awarded a traveling fellowship that no woman
had yet received. Knowing this, the art department
strategically recommended her as J. DeFeo. She
then spent a year and a half in Europe and North
Africa before settling in Florence for 6 months.
Intrigued by ordinary objects, astronomy, unspoken
subjects, erasures, Italian architecture, jagged
mountain peaks, Asian, African & prehistoric art,
DeFeo dynamically meshes her own rhythms and
forms.
Dorothy Miller, the curator and director of the
Museum of Modern Art, who happened to be out
talent scouting, saw DeFeo’s first one-person
show at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. Miller
visited DeFeo’s studio and was hoping to include
The Rose (entitled Deathrose at that time) in the
upcoming 1959 landmark exhibition, Sixteen
Americans (December 16, 1959 - February 17,
1960). Holding out for a showing on the West
Coast, DeFeo hesitated about parting with her
work still in progress. Five other pieces were
chosen, and a reproduction of the unfinished
Deathrose was published in the accompanying
catalogue. DeFeo and her husband, Wally
Hendricks, decided to turn down the plane tickets
bought by MoMA for the opening. Hendricks, who
was also invited to be in the exhibition, was known
for his kinetic assemblages and was co-founder
of The Six Gallery, an underground art gallery and
hang for Beat poets.
“Wally and I didn’t really realize the stature and the
prestige of being included in such a show. I was
really unaware of the situation. It surprises many
people that we were the only people included
in the show who didn’t make the effort to go
back for the opening. The whole show was kind
of a coming-out party, I discovered later. It was
intended to be for galleries in search of new talent.
I was approached by the Stable Gallery through
correspondence, which I turned down.”
New York Times critic, John Canaday wrote “For my
money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for
oblivion.” Included in the show were Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth
Kelly and Frank Stella.
Having found herself on an unplanned journey that
engulfed and obsessed her for eight years, DeFeo
devoted herself intensely to painting, layering,
sculpting, working and reworking Deathrose.
She repeatedly applied thick coats of white oil
paint, using black to minimize the yellowing and
occasionally mixing in mica for sparkle, while
scraping, reapplying, working with thinness and
thickness, allowing paint to dry and carving into
the material with a palette knife. Extending the
painting’s radiating lines from a study photograph
in preparation to enlarge Deathrose, she drew
and painted these extensions directly onto the
supporting wall around the canvas, later removing
her work from its stretcher bars, gluing it to a
larger unprimed canvas and placing it in her front
room bay window. More pigment was intuitively
placed, reformatting the center, shaping hard
edged grooves into smooth ridges and crevasses
highlighting the sun’s rays, emphasizing shadows,
observing proportions, contours, growing thicker
and heavier with each stage as unpredicted
surface textures kept emerging.
Deathrose was extensively photographed in its
many evolving phases. Images circulated even
before its completion. One landed in a 1961
Art in America article, “New Talent U.S.A.” That
same year, the travel magazine Holiday included
Deathrose in a piece “San Francisco: The
Rebels.” DeFeo was the only painter mentioned
and described as “one of San Francisco’s most
successful younger artists.” The photograph of
DeFeo working on Deathrose as she stood on a
stepladder appeared in a 1962 issue of Look.
News of her mammoth sculptured painting began
spreading. Different institutions were thinking
about how they might acquire Deathrose, but
DeFeo had no intention of donating her work.
DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph
by Burt Glinn. © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos.
In 1965, DeFeo and Hendricks ended up being
evicted from their Fillmore studio when the building
was condemned and new owners doubled the rent.
Deathrose measured nearly 12’ x 8’ with depths in
spots deeper than eight inches and had to be cut
away from the studio wall, a crate built around it,
lowered by forklift to a truck below and relocated
to a small room for storage at the Pasadena Art
Museum.
Bruce Conner, friend, filmmaker, interdisciplinary
REVOLT Magazine Number 4, 2013 8