She was a painter and photographer; imaginative; obsessive about process; and a friend of poets and other artists, Alan Ginsberg, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner among them.

In 1958, she started work on what became her magnum opus: a monster mixed-media painting titled The Rose, which, secreted in her studio, she worked on continuously for seven years. By the time it was finished, the crusty painting was an 11-by-8-foot object that reached a depth of 11 inches in some areas and weighed some 3,000 pounds. It made her legendary. (The Rose was acquired by the Whiney Museum in the '90s, and its complex story was the subject of an entire book.)

Yet few people know the artist and less about her work.

A traveling exhibit at the Menil Collection in 1990 introduced DeFeo to Houston. It included one huge 12-foot-high painting, Doctor Jazz, dated the same year she started The Rose, but the focus was on her works on paper. That more intimate and immediate facet of her creativity is revisited in a current exhibit titled Where the Swan Flies at Moody Gallery. click here to read complete review


Jay DeFeo
Nielsen, Boston
by Joanne Silver, ARTnews, January 2008

The Rose (1958-66), an 11-by-8-foot, one-ton behemoth, claimed eight years of Jay Defeo's life and exercised extraordinary power over her career. The picture assured the San Francisco painter's reputation more than four decades ago but has also eclipsed much of the rest of her output. This result is regrettable because many of her drawings, modest-size paintings, photographs, and collages are marked by a surprising grace, wit, and restraint. click here to read complete review


I Should Go to the Very Center
by Dana Miller, Catalogue for the exhibition Jay DeFeo: No End : Works on Paper from the 1980s, Botanicals: Photographs from the 1970s, August-September 2006

Jay DeFeo's first toy was a pencil, or so her mother was fond of telling people. As a young girl, DeFeo drew constantly, and the arrival of each new coloring book was a monumental event. While she was in elementary school, a neighbor gave her a "how-to-draw" book, and she spent hours practicing her favorite exercise, how to draw the perfect circle. As a mature artist, the circle, along with the triangle, the cross, the square, the spiral, and the oval, became the basis of her formal iconography. click here to read complete essay


When a Plant Is Not a Plant: The Botanical Photographs of Jay DeFeo
by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Aperture, Spring 2007
Originally published in the catalogue for the exhibition Jay DeFeo: No End : Works on Paper from the 1980s, Botanicals: Photographs from the 1970s, presented at Dwight Hackett projects in Santa Fe, NM. August 5 - September 23, 2006. Edited for publication in Aperture.

As an artist, Jay DeFeo worked with an impressive array of media‹including oil, acrylic, tempera, pastel, gouache, ink, charcoal, wax pencil, graphite, and enamel ‹which she applied variously to paper, canvas, linen, and Masonite. She also made collages, photocollages, and photographs. Although she did not begin to work intensely with photographs until the 1970s, there was an ongoing dialogue between what she photographed and what she painted and drew dating back at least to the mid-fifties. click here to read complete original essay


Jay DeFeo at Mills College
by Michael Duncan, Art in America, September 2005

Despite her iconic status as creator of the epic painting The Rose, whole bodies of work by Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) remain largely unknown. Following the exhausting and cathartic project of creating The Rose (1958-1966), DeFeo withdrew from making art or engaging with the art world for four years. In 1971, just after returning to drawing, she took up photography, discovering a new medium for exploring her sensitive blend of abstraction and figuration. click here to read complete review


The Highs | Art: The Art and Artists of the Year
by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, December 28, 2003

The current pocket-size Whitney show of the Bay Area legend Jay DeFeo is a reminder of what giving your life for art means. Her "Rose," an icon of late Abstract Expressionism and Beat art, with nearly a ton of accumulated paint, is a virtual sculpture and an enduring artifact of intractable will. click here to read complete review


An Obsession, Now Excavated
by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, Friday, October 10, 2003

In 1958 Jay DeFeo, whose small show at the Whitney Museum is a gem and long overdue, started working on a large canvas from which she had recently scraped remnants of a couple of paintings, one of a mountain, the other, prophetically, on the theme of Jacob wrestling the angel. click here to read complete review


Goings on About Town: Art
The New Yorker, October 27, 2003

The Bay Area painter Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is best known for her magnum opus, "The Rose." It took her eight years (1958-66) to complete, and by the time it was extricated from her studio it weighed more than a ton. (The studio floor had grown so encrusted with paint that the artist Bruce Conner, who filmed the painting's removal, described walking on it as feeing "like walking on the back of a whale.") "The Rose," with its radiant mass of silvery-white impasto, lies literally at the center of this small but potent show, "Beside 'The Rose': Selected Works by Jay DeFeo." [exhibit title in bold] But the show opens with a more typical gesture: a seven-foot-long drawing of a ghostly pair of eyes. Puzzling vertical lines simultaneously fracture the image and heighten its oracular intensity -- a struggle between obfuscation and revelation that's at the heart of DeFeo's elusive art.


Early comments about "Jay DeFeo and 'The Rose'"

Release: October 2003, Published by University of California Press and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

"DeFeo has been one of the least seen and least known of the truly brilliant artists of our time, but I've come to believe that the strength and inventiveness of her finest art will be seen as rivaling that of the greatest artists of the twentieth century."
Walter Hopps, from "Think of Jay DeFeo Dancing to Count Basie Playing 'One O'clock Jump'"

"Eight years in the making, Jay DeFeo's The Rose was hidden behind a wall for over two decades and uncovered only after the artist's death. This book presents an account of its remarkable birth, burial, rescue, and resurrection through the words of conservators, curators, art historians, friends of the artist, and critics. The volume's sensitively written essays bring The Rose back to life in all its enigmatic complexity. It is a story unparalleled in contemporary art history, by turns riveting, heartbreaking, and exhilarating."
Eleanor Heartney, author of Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads

"A gorgeous and moving book about a grand American masterpiece."
Thomas Hoving

"Is The Rose erupting or imploding, or is it doing both simultaneously-swallowing up and disgorging a life, an era, an entire mythos? The current volume, at last grappling with the whole of Jay DeFeo's great billowing fever dream of a masterpiece, plugs a gaping hole in the history of contemporary American art, and does so with a sense of moment and scale and flair worthy of its mind-blowing subject."
Lawrence Weschler


To purchase "Jay DeFeo and 'TheRose'" go to:

University of California Press