Before and since her death at 60 in 1989, Jay DeFeo's reputation has hinged on one colossal work: The Rose (1958-66). A retrospective opening today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns the painting, corrects that overemphasis. Born in 1929 in Hanover, New Hampshire, Jay DeFeo was one of the few women of her generation to rise to artistic prominence, but one who has not been given her due until now. Her unconventional approach to materials, and an intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art who defies easy categorization.

The exhibition, organized by the Whitney in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern  Art, where it was previously on view, has an elegiac quality; this feeling is appropriate for an artist who received early recognition, yet struggled in poverty for most of her life.

On graduating with an MFA in studio art from UC Berkeley in 1951, she received a fellowship that enabled her to travel through Europe and North Africa for a year and a half, making stops in New York City at each end of her trip, where she encountered the then-reigning style of Abstract Expressionism. Through the work she created during her travels, mostly tempera thickly applied on paper, DeFeo synthesized archetypal forms derived from pre-historic and non-Western art with contemporary abstraction to articulate a visual vocabulary that inflected her work throughout her career.

On her return to Berkeley in 1953, DeFeo settled in among the San Francisco community of artists, poets, and musicians later labeled the Beat generation. Her larger circle of friends and peers included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Sonia Gechtoff, Ed Kienholz, and the artist Wally Hedrick, whom she married in 1954.

Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney, introduces Jay DeFeo's work, with The Rose in the background.

She began a series of sculptural pieces using discarded materials and household tools. There is a small photograph of her working on a plaster piece at her kitchen sink, wearing kitten heels and a shift dress; on the wall above the sink are two cruciform pieces made of wood, fabric and plaster, which are installed on the adjacent wall in the gallery. In the fall of that year, she was arrested in her first and only attempt to steal paint, which everyone in her circle was doing. Because of this, she was unable to teach. She then began creating earrings and pendants that look like miniature abstract sculpture, which became her main source of income.

In 1959, DeFeo had a solo show of 14 works at Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco that led to her first significant sales. The attention she received led to her inclusion in Sixteen Americans, a star-making exhibition held later that year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that also featured such rising stars as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

From 1958 to 1966, DeFeo worked almost exclusively on The Rose, and when she finished, the work consisted of so many layers of paint that it weighed close to a ton. At the Whitney it is installed against a black wall, lighted from the side as it was while she worked on it in her studio. Here it is situated at the end of a gallery (dubbed The Rose Chapel by museum director Adam Weinberg) which is lined with the large-scale paintings that preceded it. View Bruce Conner's film about The Rose being removed from DeFeo’s studio.

Exhausted, both physically and mentally, DeFeo then took a three-year hiatus from making art and largely faded from the public's consciousness. It was only after The Rose was finally given a museum exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum, which then traveled to the San Francisco Art Institute the same year, that she began working again.

During the 1970s, DeFeo lived in Larkspur, California, and taught at several Bay Area schools and, for a time, at the San Francisco Art Institute. She resumed making art and worked prolifically, exploring photography in depth and incorporating it into her practice in innovative ways. A 1973 National Endowment for the Arts grant allowed her to further pursue her photographic experiments and she created a highly inventive body of hybrid works on paper.

Left: Two paintings from the Loop System series, 1975. Right: Untitled, 1975, photo collage with graphite, wrapped in plastic.

Although DeFeo worked spontaneously, her paintings, drawings, and photo-collages evolved through a slow technique of building up an image and then reworking it, or erasing it and starting all over again. This open-ended process, which the artist described as a "cliff-hanging experience," allowed for highly expressionistic forms and an astonishing range of surface modulation. Yet DeFeo's intuitive and expansive method of working was tempered by her sense of compositional order and an often restrained grisaille palette. It is this state of balance, between carefully composed images and lush surfaces, expressive forms and subtle coloring, that intensifies her unique and utterly compelling body of work.

In 1981 DeFeo moved to Oakland and joined the faculty of Mills College, where she was awarded tenure in 1986 and taught until her death in 1989, from lung cancer. She continued to produce art and was the subject of several significant shows including a 1984 solo presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute as the recipient of the Adaline Kent Award and a 1989 exhibition, Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper, at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective continues through June 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 945 Madison Avenue, at 75^th Street, NY, NY. 

The exhibition catalogue for Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, includes many photographs of the artist and her circle; texts by Michael Duncan, Corey Keller, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, and Greil Marcus; and plates of works on view. Information.