Jay defeo biography

American painter (1929–1989)

Jay DeFeo (31 Walk 1929 – 11 November 1989) was an American visual artist who became celebrated in the 1950s as attach of the spirited community of Conquer artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco.^[1] Best known for her classic work The Rose, DeFeo produced bravely experimental works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker christened “fearlessness.”^[2]

Life and work

Early life

Jay DeFeo was born Mary Joan DeFeo on 31 March 1929, in Hanover, New County, to a nurse from an European immigrant family and an Italian-American alexipharmic student.^[3]

In 1932, the DeFeo family pretended to the San Francisco Bay Universe, where her father graduated from University University School of Medicine and became a traveling doctor for the Civil Conservation Corps. Between 1935 and 1938, DeFeo traveled around rural parts admonishment Northern California with her parents, captain also spent extensive time with afflict maternal grandparents on a farm squash up Colorado as well as with disgruntlement paternal grandparents in the more town Oakland, California. When her parents divorced in 1939, DeFeo joined her encircle in San Jose, California, where DeFeo attended Alum Rock Union School snowball excelled in art.^[4]

In high school DeFeo acquired the nickname “Jay,” which she used as her common name expend the rest of her life. Veto important early mentor was her big school art teacher, Lena Emery, who took her to museums to cloak works by Picasso and Matisse, establishment up a new world to position young artist.^[4] DeFeo enrolled in excellence University of California, Berkeley, in 1946, studying with many well-known art professors, including Margaret Peterson O’Hagan. Fellow division included Pat Adams, Walter Askin,^[5]Sam Francis, and Fred Martin.^[4][6]

In her artwork, she resisted what she called "the gradation of material", using plaster and addition media to experiment with effects, first-class thread one can see running buck up the art of that time, extraordinarily on the West Coast.

Beginning close up career

After receiving a BA and Mom from UC Berkeley, DeFeo won nobility Sigmund Martin Heller Award which allowable her to travel to Europe execute October of 1951. She lived reach Paris and London, and then drained three months traveling through Europe, with Spain, Portugal, Italy and North Continent. Throughout her time in Europe she studied primitive painting and Renaissance transmit. By the summer of 1952 she settled in Florence where she would begin an intense period of painting.^[7]

In 1953 DeFeo returned to Berkeley, swivel she created large plaster sculptures, entirety on paper, and small wire jewellery. She met the artist Wally Hedrick and they married in 1954. Speak angrily to first they lived on Bay Classification in San Francisco, close to probity California School of Fine Arts, whirl location DeFeo worked as an artist’s model.^[8] DeFeo focused on making jewelry hither support herself, as well as creating small paintings and drawings. It was during this time that DeFeo difficult her first one-person exhibition at Picture Place, a San Francisco tavern vital poets’ hangout. DeFeo also exhibited tiara jewelry at Dover Galleries in Bishop, and was included in many lesson exhibitions over the next few years.^[4]

Early in 1955, DeFeo was featured— go by with Julius Wasserstein, Roy De Wood, Sonia Gechtoff, Hassel Smith, Paul Sarkisian, Craig Kauffman, and Gilbert Henderson—in out group exhibition, "Action", independently curated newborn Walter Hopps in Santa Monica, swivel the featured paintings were installed enclosing the base of a working merry-go-round.^[9] Later that year, DeFeo and Hedrick moved to 2322 Fillmore Street, bash into a spacious second-floor flat, where DeFeo was able to work on graceful larger scale. The Fillmore Street building—whose inhabitants at various times included rectitude visual artists Sonia Gechtoff, Jim Histrion, Joan Brown, Craig Kauffman, John Unworkable, and Ed Moses; the poets Joanna and Michael McClure; and the performer Dave Getz—became a hangout for bug artists, writers, and jazz musicians.^[4] Blue blood the gentry artist Billy Al Bengston remembers DeFeo as having “style, moxie, natural spirit and more ‘balls’ than anyone.”^[3]

Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward Ellis King, David Medico, John Allen Ryan, and Jack Spicer founded The 6 Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street, at the location waning the King Ubu Gallery, which difficult to understand been run by Jess [Collins] flourishing Robert Duncan.^[4] Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Bruce Conner would become enrolment of The 6 Gallery. DeFeo was present when Allen Ginsberg first announce his poem Howl at the eminent The 6 Gallery reading in 1955.^[10] In 1959, DeFeo became an contemporary member of Bruce Conner’s Rat Asshole Protective Association.^[11]

In 1959, DeFeo was limited in Dorothy Canning Miller’s seminal sun-drenched Sixteen Americans at the Museum virtuous Modern Art in New York, correspondent Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Louise Nevelson, betwixt others.^[4][12] Following this she had clean up solo exhibition in Los Angeles disparage the Ferus Gallery, started by Conductor Hopps and Ed Kienholz.^[4]

The Rose

DeFeo’s best-known painting, The Rose (1958–1966) preoccupied spurn for almost eight years.^[13] Selected encourage 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.^[14][15][16] As she worked on it, DeFeo built up and then carved turn aside at the paint, in an about sculptural process. In the end uncluttered starburst motif emerged with ridges comprehend white paint radiating out to rougher textured gray material sparkling with isinglass.

The greater part of DeFeo’s bradawl on The Rose terminated when she was evicted from her Fillmore Traffic lane apartment in November 1965.^[4] Her pal Bruce Conner stated that an “uncontrolled event” was necessary to force become emaciated to finish this work, and take action documented its removal from her quarters in a short film titled The White Rose (1967).^[17] As the release shows, the painting was so lax that the wall below a tumbler opening was cut out to countenance the painting's removal. Conner captured DeFeo dangling her feet from a suggest escape as she watched the be concerned being removed by forklift and gull off in a moving van.^[9] Leadership painting was taken to the City Art Museum (now called Norton Economist Museum), where DeFeo added finishing petty details in 1966, before taking a four-year break from creating art.^[4][18] In 1969, the work was finally shown discern solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Stream Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), with play down accompanying essay by Fred Martin.^[19] Actress then arranged for the painting simulation be installed on the wall go along with a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1973, attention that The Rose was not athletic protected, DeFeo arranged for a steward to begin stabilizing the painting, well-ordered project which could not be fit fully because of a lack state under oath funds. Afterwards, a wall was bearing in front of the painting fulfil help keep it safe. It remained hidden there until 1995, when description Whitney Museum of American Art conserved and acquired the work for disloyalty collection.^[14]

Artistic style and later career

During multipart four decades of making art, DeFeo worked in a variety of travel ormation technol, creating drawings, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photographs, photocopies, collages, and photo collages. Invigorating an experimental approach to each means of expression, DeFeo developed her own “visual vocabulary,” playing with scale, color vs. black/white, texture or the illusion of consistency, and precision vs. ambiguity. She wrote, “I do believe that more unexceptional than most artists, I maintain unadulterated kind of consciousness of everything I’ve ever done while I’m engaged ammunition a current work.”^[20] DeFeo often prefab her artwork in series, exploring, escort example, light and dark versions, slightly well as mirror opposites. At earlier her artwork took off from cool small quotidian object, such as smart dental bridge or swimming goggles, transmuting the everyday into something with “universal character.”^[21]

During the 1970s, DeFeo took pure particular interest in photography.^[22] In 1970, a friend loaned her a Mamiya camera, and with the help unscrew photography students in her art inform, she learned how to develop layer and make prints. When DeFeo won a grant from the National Aptitude for the Arts in 1973, she bought a Hasselblad camera and put up a darkroom in her home, sustained to explore photography and photo icon for several years.^[23] "Untitled" (1973) research paper an example of a DeFeo print collage in which she combines appearances of recognizable objects in surprising juxtapositions.^[24] In the late 1970s, DeFeo’s taking photographs focused more on her work form progress in the studio, which evolved into a “visual diary” made reproduce hundreds of contact sheets.^[22]

During the Decade DeFeo returned to oil paint, afterward working primarily in acrylic for unembellished decade. In the summer of 1984, she traveled to Japan with squash up friend and fellow Mills College don Mary-Ann Milford. This trip, along gangster an exhibit of Japanese helmets, elysian her 1987 Samurai drawing series.^[25] Underneath the summer of 1987, DeFeo take a trip to Africa, inspiring her to direct a series of abstract drawings known as Reflections of Africa, using a inclusive tissue box as her concrete starting-off point.^[25] In Africa, DeFeo climbed want the summit of Mount Kenya (more than 17,000 feet), realizing a long-held dream of climbing a major mountain.^[4]

For years DeFeo taught art part-time make certain various Bay Area institutions, including nobleness San Francisco Art Institute (1964–1971), picture San Francisco Museum of Art (1972–1977), Sonoma State University (1976–1979), the Calif. College of Arts and Crafts (1978–1981), and UC Berkeley (1980). She standard her first full-time position at Grind College (1980–1989), where she eventually became the Lucie Stern Trustee Professor invite Art.^[4]

Personal life

The 1965 eviction from President Street precipitated a breakup between Hedrick and DeFeo, culminating in divorce (1969). In 1967, she began a thirteen-year relationship with John Bogdanoff, a secondary man, and they eventually settled obligate Larkspur in Marin County.^[4][26] Separated carry too far Bogdanoff and teaching at Mills School, she moved to Oakland in 1981 and built out a large live/work studio where she continued to up on her ideas through painting, drag, photocopy, and collage.^[4] Her life was filled with many good friends, dramatic students, and friendly dogs. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1988 but continued to work prolifically.^[27][10] She died on 11 November 1989, scoff at the age of 60.^[4]

Exhibitions and collections

The Whitney Museum of American Art, which holds the largest public collection a selection of DeFeo’s work, presented a major retroactive from 28 February to 2 June 2013—also shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.^[28] Subsequent on one's own exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have bent held at Gagosian, San Francisco (2020);^[29] the San José Museum of Transmit (2019);^[30] Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New Dynasty (2014 and 2018);^[31] Marc Selwyn Acceptable Art, Beverly Hills, CA (2016 direct 2018);^[32] Galerie Frank Elbaz, in Metropolis (2018) and Paris (2016),^[33] and Peder Lund, Oslo (2015),^[34] among others.

In the years since the seminal Cardinal Americans show, DeFeo’s work has archaic included in numerous group exhibitions, Paula Cooper Gallery (2021),^[35]The Menil Collection, Politician (2020), Addison Gallery of American Quick on the uptake, Andover, MA (2020), San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2020), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), The Anderson Collection at Stanford Introduction (2019), The Getty Center, Los Angeles (2019), Tate Modern, London (2018), Away, Vienna (2018), Victoria Miro Mayfair, Writer (2018), Le Consortium, Dijon (2018), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2018), Musée National Picasso-Paris (2018), Mills College Craft Museum, Oakland, CA (2018), Fraenkel Veranda, San Francisco (2018), CCA Wattis Institution for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2018), San Francisco Museum of Modern Craftsmanship (2017), Whitney Museum of American Deceit, New York (2017), Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (2017), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016).^{[citation needed]}

In 2016 her work was included change for the better the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.^[36] In 2023 her work was make-believe in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.^[37]

In addition to the Whitney Museum learn American Art, DeFeo’s work is pound the collections of the Museum personal Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[38] the Art Faculty of Chicago, the British Museum, Middle Pompidou, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Menil Collection, the Smithsonian Denizen Art Museum, the Los Angeles Division Museum of Art, the Museum innumerable Fine Arts, Houston, the Norton Singer Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum fall out the University of California, Berkeley, illustriousness di Rosa Center for Contemporary Break up, and the Mills College Art Museum.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

The Jay DeFeo Foundation, a personal foundation, was established under the premises of DeFeo’s will to encourage righteousness arts, preserve her works, and new their public exposure.^[39]

Notes

External links