Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo (31 March 1929 – 11 November 1989) was a 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 courageously experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”

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 1932, the DeFeo family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her father graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and became a traveling doctor for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Between 1935 and 1938, DeFeo traveled around rural parts of Northern California with her parents, and also spent extensive time with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Colorado as well as with her paternal grandparents in the more urban Oakland, California.

When her parents divorced in 1939, DeFeo joined her mother in San Jose, California, where DeFeo attended Alum Rock Union School and excelled in art.

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.

DeFeo enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946, studying with many well-known art professors, including Margaret Peterson O’Hagan.

Fellow students included Pat Adams, Walter Askin, 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.

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.

Early in 1955, DeFeo was featured— along with Julius Wasserstein, Roy De Forest, Sonia Gechtoff, Hassel Smith, Paul Sarkisian, Craig Kauffman, and Gilbert Henderson—in a group exhibition, "Action", independently curated by Walter Hopps in Santa Monica, where the featured paintings were installed around the base of a working merry-go-round.

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.

The artist Billy Al Bengston remembers DeFeo as having “style, moxie, natural beauty and more ‘balls’ than anyone.”

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.

Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Bruce Conner would become associates of The 6 Gallery.

DeFeo was present when Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl at the famous The 6 Gallery reading in 1955.

DeFeo’s best-known painting, The Rose (1958–1966) preoccupied her for almost eight years.

Selected by Thomas Hoving for his book Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization, this masterwork stands over 3.2 meters tall and weighs over a ton.

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.

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.

The greater part of DeFeo’s work on The Rose terminated when she was evicted from her Fillmore Street apartment in November 1965.

The painting was taken to the Pasadena Art Museum (now called Norton Simon Museum), where DeFeo added finishing details in 1966, before taking a four-year break from creating art.

Her friend Bruce Conner stated that an “uncontrolled event” was necessary to force her to finish this work, and he documented its removal from her apartment in a short film titled The White Rose (1967).

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 later arranged for the painting to be stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it remained hidden behind a wall, in need of conservation, until 1995, when the Whitney Museum of American Art conserved and acquired the work for its collection.

During her four decades of making art, DeFeo worked in a variety of media, creating drawings, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photographs, photocopies, collages, and photo collages.

Using an experimental approach to each medium, DeFeo developed her own “visual vocabulary,” playing with scale, color vs. black/white, texture or the illusion of texture, and precision vs. ambiguity.