JAY DEFEO
Agnes Martin and Jay De Feo spent a lifetime searching for clarity of thought. Their works glow in these two shows.
By 1966, the artist Jay DeFeo had labored obsessively over “The Rose,” the monumental work for which she’s best known, for eight years. It was 2,000 pounds of encrusted oil paint when it was excised from her apartment via forklift, and likely would have been more were she not being evicted. Psychically depleted, she dropped out of the art world, producing no work for three years, then shifting to eerie, Surrealist-inflected photography and photocopy collages — images of her dental bridge and a tripod shot to look like disembodied legs. When she returned to oil paint, after 16 years, it was with a certain clarity — both reprisal and refinement.
Fourteen paintings on paper by Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) offer a provocative thumbnail sketch of a crucial period in the artist’s development. She tagged her extended 1952 stay working in a studio in Florence, Italy, as a foundational episode in her career. DeFeo made around 200 paintings on paper that summer, and these works from 1951 to 1954 frame the moment.
