Jay DeFeo and The Rose / Edition 1

by Jane Green, Leah Levy

Overview

Rarely is an artist so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her monumental painting The Rose. Begun in the late 1950s, when DeFeo, a central figure of the Beat generation of San Francisco, was just starting to garner widespread national recognition, the visionary work occupied the artist for eight years. Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This volume is the first major study of The Rose in particular and of Jay DeFeo in general. In the collection, eleven distinguished art and cultural historians—Bill Berkson, Niccolo Caldararo, Richard Cándida Smith, Walter Hopps, Lucy R. Lippard, Greil Marcus, Sandra S. Phillips, Marla Prather, Carter Ratcliff, David A. Ross, and Martha Sherrill—unfold the story of the creation, as well as the tricky and painstaking rescue, of DeFeo’s radiant masterpiece. While providing new material on The Rose and exposing many myths surrounding both the artist and her great work, these essays also place Jay DeFeo in relation to artists of her time, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, and Eva Hesse. The book, which adds significantly to the scholarship of postwar American art, includes nearly eighty halftones, thirteen color plates, and Judith Dunham’s detailed Rose-related chronology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520233553
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/13/2003
Series:	Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Book S
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jane Green is an art historian and has worked on exhibitions at Mills College Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum, two institutions associated with DeFeo. Leah Levy is an independent curator and trustee of the Estate of Jay DeFeo. She worked directly with DeFeo as curatorial consultant from 1985 until the artist’s death in 1989, and organized the conservation of The Rose. She is author of Kathryn Gustafson: Sculpting the Land (1998) and guest curator of Revelatory Landscapes (2001) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Hometown:

Westport, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

May 31, 1968

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

"Managed to drop out of Fine Art Degree at University."

Website:

http://www.janegreen.com

Table of Contents

Foreword: Beside The Rose: DeFeo’s Work at the Whitney Museum
Marla Prather

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Jane Green and Leah Levy

COLOR GALLERY
The Legendary Rose
David A. Ross

The Story of The Rose
Martha Sherrill

Think of Jay DeFeo Dancing to Count Basie Playing "One O’clock Jump"
Walter Hopps

Without The Rose: DeFeo in Sixteen Americans
Bill Berkson

Transplanting The Rose
Lucy R. Lippard

Photographing The Rose
Sandra S. Phillips


PORTFOLIO
Valentine’s Day
Greil Marcus

Conserving The Rose
Niccolo Caldararo

Vectors of Emergence, Lines of Descent
Richard Cándida Smith

Art and the Limits of Language: A Critical Approach to The Rose
Carter Ratcliff

Chronology
Judith Dunham

List of Illustrations with Photo Credits
Selected Bibliography on The Rose
Contributors
Index