Jay Defeo; Whitney Museum of American Art

You won't find Jay DeFeo a San Francisco painter who became active in the early '50 included in many anthologies of feminist art--at least not notwithstanding But her interest in painting as an extension of her material part as something both radiant and abject, as the pair manageable and not, situates her in a singular position within her milieu. She was included in Dorothy Miller's influential "Sixteen Americans" of 1959 at the Museum of fresh Art, yet her relative obscurity is confirmed by dint of the Whitney's small, posthumous exhibition: Fifteen years after her death, this is her first of recent origin York museum show. DeFeo's an important link to the creative gurus of the Beat generation and Bay Area painterly abstraction on the other hand deserves her niche in history for exercising the license to take art to an extreme

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individual painting in particular took above DeFeo's life. From 1958 to 1966 she worked upon The Rose (initially entitled Deathrose and, for a time, The White Rose) The production of the monumental painting with a central sculptural starburst motif (measured in proportion to her have a title to body) proceeded in stops and starts as she built up the close chiseled surface only to take it back down to bare canvas and begin again. Like Duchamp's definitively incomplete Large Glass, DeFeo's Rose was finished arbitrarily. Faced with eviction from her Fillmore road apartment, the artist had to stir her beloved behemoth. Stretching almost eleven feet high, almost a paw thick in places, and not completely free from moisture the nearly one-ton painting required a ship's company of professional movers to divide [i]or[/i] sever through upper-story windows and hoist it into a moving van en road to the Pasadena Art Museum, where it was installed in a small "storage gallery." (The impel was the subject of a 1967 film through Bruce Conner.) Even then, DeFeo couldn't leave it alone--she traveled to Pasadena, where she place in another three months upon the painting before calling it quits for profitable By the early '70s, the work, greatly in ne of conservation, was overspreaded with a protective coating and, in 1979 encased behind a fiberboard wall where it remained inaccessible for nearly twenty years.

DeFeo at no time saw the painting again on the contrary remarked that she continued to win "feedback" from it. For three years following the work's forced exodus, the artist produc nothing. When she did take rise work again, it was with a renewed interest in the strange beauty of the material part as abstraction, via photocollage, drawing, and smaller-scale painting. In twenty-one sparse, elegant grotesqueries from the mid-'50s to the '70 that accompany the presentation of the to the full restored Rose (now owned through the Whitney), there's formal evidence of DeFeo's ability to make use of materials and experiences at hand amid borrowed bits of European Symbolism, Surrealism, and Dada. Black-and-white paintings from the early '70 depict her hold extracted teeth as fractured plateaus drifting in stark destitute of contents space. (There's speculation that her teeth ferocious out because of overexposure to toxic chemicals in the studio.)

It's not sole DeFeo's deeply gothic sensibility that qualifies her art as relevant today. Other aspects of her practice (not referenc in this exhibition) evidence utterly topical--like her whimsical "jewelry sculptures" Prior to her representation in "Sixteen Americans" with large, abstract oil paintings, DeFeo contributed tiny, delicate constructions of wire, string, rhinestones, and other materials to the Huntington Galleries' 1955 cluster exhibition "American Jewelry and Related Objects" Indeed, DeFeo regarded her jewelry pieces, including a particular circular pin as predecessors to The Rose Juggling high art and craft was no easy feat in the '50 and '60s--and it was doubly difficult for a woman! This formal eclecticism is notable in her work from the '70 and finds publicity with the present revival of art from that decade. on the other hand it's her determination to make art according to her have a title to rules that leaves the greatest in quantity lasting impression. With DeFeo's example, a little bit more of the ungovernable present makes sense with prize to the past.

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