OUT OF HER SHELL Jay DeFeo’s ‘After Image’ (1970) marked her return to artmaking after the arduous labor of ‘The Rose.’
In Full Bloom
Jay DeFeo, one of the 20th century’s great painters, is memorialized in two exhibits BY GABE MELINE AND MICHAEL S. GANT
I
t was the late 1970s at Sonoma State University, and Jay DeFeo was not doing particularly well.
“She was struggling to survive,� says Sebastopol artist Susan Moulton, then the department head at SSU. “She didn’t make a lot of money. And at that time, she wasn’t selling a lot.� Finances were one issue, but something else plagued the famed artist at the time: toxins.
In creating her subsuming masterwork The Rose, DeFeo had ingested substantial amounts of white lead, resulting in a loss of teeth and hair. At SSU, she got her ďŹ rst cancer scare—not that it hindered her. “She started eating really well and jogging every day at noon, and taking real control of her life,â€? says Moulton. “I saw her at Mills College right before she died, and she had just climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.â€? DeFeo’s few years teaching at SSU, alongside Moulton, William
Morehouse and others, are but a brief brushstroke in DeFeo’s life, which was extinguished by cancer in 1989. But the artist’s biography has taken on a life of its own, sometimes bolstering, other times hampering critical appraisal of her achievements. A new retrospective at SFMOMA brings together for the ďŹ rst time signiďŹ cant examples of her work and makes a powerful case for elevating her to the top ranks of post–World War II American artists; a concurrent exhibit at
di Rosa, titled “Renaissance on Fillmore, 1955–65,â€? gives historical context from the apartment building that served as an incubator for DeFeo’s work. Starting in the late 1940s, DeFeo established herself as part of the Bay Area abstract expressionism movement. At SFMOMA, early pieces, like Untitled (Florence), 1952, feature dynamic passages of bold colors anchored by simple geometric gestures. Later, she shifted to a monochromatic palette. The large canvas Untitled (Everest), 1955, builds from a smooth gray bottom section into a urry of blacks and whites applied vigorously in overlapping waves like roiling clouds announcing a storm. More controlled but just as action-ďŹ lled is Origin, 1956, a tightly bunched series of narrow vertical strokes of black and gray—the painting is poised between a upward thrusts, like jets in a fountain, and a downward crashing, like a great falls pouring over a rock rim. Her work echoes and equals that of several major ďŹ gures from the period: early Diebenkorn, Hassel Smith, Clyfford Still and Frank Lobdell. The exhibit also shows DeFeo’s forays into other media. She fashioned oddly crude wood and plaster sculptures of crosses and primitive totemic creatures (which inuenced Manuel Neri). She made meticulous charcoal drawings in which ďŹ ne waving and spiraling lines course through blank space. She experimented with collages of found images in the manner of fellow San Franciscan Jess. In the late ’50s, DeFeo embarked on a series of large paintings distinguished by the dense application, with a palette knife, of oil paints. These works take on a 3-D aspect, ) 20 as much sculpture as
N O RT H BAY B O H E M I A N | JA N UA RY 9 -1 5, 2 0 1 3 | B O H E M I A N.COM
DeFeo Trust and Artists Rights Society
Arts Ideas
19