Jay DeFeo: The Rose
Between 1958 and early 1966, Jay DeFeo worked continuously on her epic painting, The Rose, which she began on the canvas of an abandoned painting. She was intent on producing an image of radiating form, an image with a center. The painting was very much a process piece, as DeFeo worked on it daily in the Fillmore Street apartment she shared with her then-husband, Wally Hedrick. For eight years, she layered on and then scraped away massive amounts of paint, carving the accretion down like a block of marble and adding wire, beads, pearls, and wooden strips. The painting also went through what DeFeo called art historical stages - Archaic geometric and then Baroque, ultimately Classical. In the end, it had grown to almost 11 feet high, 8 inches think in places, and weighed over 2,300 pounds; it was, in the words of George Herms, "the ultimate living creature."
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and art patron J. Patrick Lannan were interested in purchasing the work, but DeFeo turned them down, convinced that it was not finished. In 1965, she and the painting were forced to leave the building and The Rose was removed, an event documented by Bruce Conner in his movie, The White Rose. DeFeo continued to work on The Rose at the Pasadena Art Museum, where it was finally exhibited in 1969, with a second showing later that year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was then moved to the San Francisco Art Institute, where, in 1974, it was covered with plaster for support and protection and stored behind a wall of a conference room. Although the legend grew about The Rose, it remained sealed and unseen until 1995, when it was excavated and restored in a major conservation effort by a team of conservators, who used traditional methods as well as the newest technologies to create a backing strong enough to support the great weight of the paint. The Rose is on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art through 1997.
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Jay DeFeoUnited States, 1929-1989 . The Rose . 1958-1966 . oil on canvas with wood, beads, perals and mica Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Gift of the Estate of Jay DeFeo and purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and The Judith Rothschild Foundation