Jay DeFeo (31 March 1929 – 11 November 1989) was an American visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work The Rose, DeFeo produced experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”

Life and work

Early life

Jay DeFeo was born Mary Joan DeFeo on 31 March 1929, in Hanover, New Hampshire, to a nurse from an Austrian immigrant family and an Italian-American medical student.

In high school DeFeo acquired the nickname “Jay,” which she used as her common name for the rest of her life. An important early mentor was her high school art teacher, Lena Emery, who took her to museums to see works by Picasso and Matisse, opening up a new world to the young artist. Sam Francis, and Fred Martin.

In her artwork, she resisted what she called "the hierarchy of material", using plaster and mixing media to experiment with effects, a thread one can see running through the art of that time, especially on the West Coast.

Beginning art career

After receiving a BA and MA from UC Berkeley, DeFeo won the Sigmund Martin Heller Award which allowed her to travel to Europe in October 1951. She lived in Paris and London, and then spent three months traveling through Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Italy and North Africa. Throughout her time in Europe she studied primitive painting and Renaissance art. By the summer of 1952 she settled in Florence where she would begin an intense period of painting.

In 1953 DeFeo returned to Berkeley, where she created large plaster sculptures, works on paper, and small wire jewelry. She met the artist Wally Hedrick and they married in 1954. At first they lived on Bay Street in San Francisco, close to the California School of Fine Arts, where DeFeo worked as an artist’s model. DeFeo focused on making jewelry to support herself, as well as creating small paintings and drawings. It was during this time that DeFeo had her first one-person exhibition at The Place, a San Francisco tavern and poets’ hangout. DeFeo also exhibited her jewelry at Dover Galleries in Berkeley, and was included in many group exhibitions over the next few years. Later that year, DeFeo and Hedrick moved to 2322 Fillmore Street, into a spacious second-floor flat, where DeFeo was able to work on a larger scale. The Fillmore Street building—whose inhabitants at various times included the visual artists Sonia Gechtoff, Jim Kelly, Joan Brown, Craig Kauffman, John Duff, and Ed Moses; the poets Joanna and Michael McClure; and the musician Dave Getz—became a hangout for other artists, writers, and jazz musicians.

Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward Ellis King, David Simpson, John Allen Ryan, and Jack Spicer founded The 6 Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street, at the location of the King Ubu Gallery, which had been run by Jess [Collins] and Robert Duncan. In 1959, DeFeo became an original member of Bruce Conner’s Rat Bastard Protective Association.

In 1959, DeFeo was included in Dorothy Canning Miller’s seminal exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alongside Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Louise Nevelson, among others. Following this she had a solo exhibition in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery, started by Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz. As she worked on it, DeFeo built up and then carved away at the paint, in an almost sculptural process. In the end a starburst motif emerged with ridges of white paint radiating out to rougher textured gray material sparkling with mica.

The greater part of DeFeo’s work on The Rose terminated when she was evicted from her Fillmore Street apartment in November 1965. As the film shows, the painting was so large that the wall below a window opening was cut out to allow the painting's removal. Conner captured DeFeo dangling her feet from a fire escape as she watched the work being removed by forklift and carried off in a moving van. In 1969, the work was finally shown in solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), with an accompanying essay by Fred Martin. Martin then arranged for the painting to be installed on the wall of a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1973, concerned that The Rose was not well protected, DeFeo arranged for a conservator to begin stabilizing the painting, a project which could not be completed fully because of a lack of funds. Afterwards, a wall was built in front of the painting to help keep it safe. It remained hidden there until 1995, when the Whitney Museum of American Art conserved and acquired the work for its collection. DeFeo often made her artwork in series, exploring, for example, light and dark versions, as well as mirror opposites. At times her artwork took off from a small quotidian object, such as a dental bridge or swimming goggles, transforming the everyday into something with “universal character.”

During the 1970s, DeFeo took a particular interest in photography. "Untitled" (1973) is an example of a DeFeo photo collage in which she combines images of recognizable objects in surprising juxtapositions. In the late 1970s, DeFeo’s photography focused more on her work in progress in the studio, which evolved into a “visual diary” made of hundreds of contact sheets.

thumb|right|400px|Untitled by Jay DeFeo, 1973, [[Gelatin silver process|gelatin silver print, Honolulu Museum of Art]]

In the 1980s, DeFeo returned to oil paint, after working primarily in acrylic for a decade. In the summer of 1984, she traveled to Japan with her friend and fellow Mills College professor Mary-Ann Milford. This trip, along with an exhibit of Japanese helmets, inspired her 1987 Samurai drawing series. In the summer of 1987, DeFeo traveled to Africa, inspiring her to produce a series of abstract drawings called Reflections of Africa, using a generic tissue box as her concrete starting-off point. Separated from Bogdanoff and teaching at Mills College, she moved to Oakland in 1981 and built out a large live/work studio where she continued to expand on her ideas through painting, drawing, photocopy, and collage. Subsequent solo exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have been held at Gagosian, San Francisco (2020); the San José Museum of Art (2019); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2014 and 2018); Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills, CA (2016 and 2018); Galerie Frank Elbaz, in Dallas (2018) and Paris (2016), and Peder Lund, Oslo (2015), among others.

In the years since the seminal Sixteen Americans show, DeFeo’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, Paula Cooper Gallery (2021), The Menil Collection, Houston (2020), Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2020), San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2020), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), The Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2019), The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2019), Tate Modern, London (2018), Secession, Vienna (2018), Victoria Miro Mayfair, London (2018), Le Consortium, Dijon (2018), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2018), Musée National Picasso-Paris (2018), Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA (2018), Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2018), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2018), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016).

In 2016, her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art, DeFeo’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,

Notes

  • The Jay DeFeo Foundation
  • Smithsonian Archives, Interview with DeFeo, 1975: Transcript, Audio excerpt
  • New Yorker magazine, "The Art World" article called "Flower Power".