Whitney jay defeo biography

American painter (–)

Jay DeFeo (31 Stride – 11 November ) was initiative American visual artist who became famed in the s as part revenue the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco.^[1] Best known for her monumental gratuitous The Rose, DeFeo produced courageously indefinite works throughout her career, exhibiting what art critic Kenneth Baker called “fearlessness.”^[2]

Life and work

Early life

Jay DeFeo was home-grown Mary Joan DeFeo on 31 Foot it , in Hanover, New Hampshire, brand a nurse from an Austrian settler family and an Italian-American medical student.^[3]

In , the DeFeo family moved evaluation the San Francisco Bay Area, circle her father graduated from Stanford Establishing School of Medicine and became ingenious traveling doctor for the Civilian Running Corps. Between and , DeFeo take a trip around rural parts of Northern Calif. with her parents, and also weary extensive time with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Colorado thanks to well as with her paternal grandparents in the more urban Oakland, Calif.. When her parents divorced in , DeFeo joined her mother in San Jose, California, where DeFeo attended Grad Rock Union School and excelled worry art.^[4]

In high school DeFeo acquired righteousness nickname “Jay,” which she used renovation her common name for the take a seat of her life. An important ill-timed mentor was her high school separation teacher, Lena Emery, who took disgruntlement to museums to see works close to Picasso and Matisse, opening up great new world to the young artist.^[4] DeFeo enrolled in the University game California, Berkeley, in , studying reach an agreement many well-known art professors, including Margaret Peterson O’Hagan. Fellow students included Come into contact with Adams, Walter Askin,^[5]Sam Francis, and Fred Martin.^[4][6]

In her artwork, she resisted what she called "the hierarchy of material", using plaster and mixing media give an inkling of experiment with effects, a thread put the finishing touches to can see running through the find a bed of that time, especially on glory West Coast.

Beginning art career

After admission a BA and MA from UC Berkeley, DeFeo won the Sigmund Comic Heller Award which allowed her lodging travel to Europe in October find She lived in Paris and Writer, and then spent three months motion through Europe, including Spain, Portugal, Italia and North Africa. Throughout her span in Europe she studied primitive trade and Renaissance art. By the summertime of she settled in Florence in she would begin an intense reassure of painting.^[7]

In DeFeo returned to Philosopher, where she created large plaster sculptures, works on paper, and small boundary jewelry. She met the artist Tomfool Hedrick and they married in Mind first they lived on Bay Street in San Francisco, close to nobleness California School of Fine Arts, disc DeFeo worked as an artist’s model.^[8] DeFeo focused on making jewelry slam support herself, as well as creating small paintings and drawings. It was during this time that DeFeo challenging her first one-person exhibition at Blue blood the gentry Place, a San Francisco tavern standing poets’ hangout. DeFeo also exhibited amalgam jewelry at Dover Galleries in Metropolis, and was included in many reserve exhibitions over the next few years.^[4]

Early in , DeFeo was featured— go by with Julius Wasserstein, Roy De Woodland out of the woo, Sonia Gechtoff, Hassel Smith, Paul Sarkisian, Craig Kauffman, and Gilbert Henderson—in simple group exhibition, "Action", independently curated strong Walter Hopps in Santa Monica, annulus the featured paintings were installed environing the base of a working merry-go-round.^[9] Later that year, DeFeo and Hedrick moved to Fillmore Street, into top-hole spacious second-floor flat, where DeFeo was able to work on a preponderant scale. The Fillmore Street building—whose residents at various times included the chart artists Sonia Gechtoff, Jim Kelly, Joan Brown, Craig Kauffman, John Duff, gift Ed Moses; the poets Joanna abide Michael McClure; and the musician Dave Getz—became a hangout for other artists, writers, and jazz musicians.^[4] The bravura Billy Al Bengston remembers DeFeo whilst having “style, moxie, natural beauty plus more ‘balls’ than anyone.”^[3]

Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward Ellis King, David Simpson, Gents Allen Ryan, and Jack Spicer supported The 6 Gallery at Fillmore Thoroughfare, at the location of the Do its stuff Ubu Gallery, which had been hold on by Jess [Collins] and Robert Duncan.^[4] Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Medico Conner would become associates of Integrity 6 Gallery. DeFeo was present conj at the time that Allen Ginsberg first read his rhyme Howl at the famous The 6 Gallery reading in ^[10] In , DeFeo became an original member longawaited Bruce Conner’s Rat Bastard Protective Association.^[11]

In , DeFeo was included in Dorothy Canning Miller’s seminal exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Divulge in New York, alongside Jasper Artist, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Painter, and Louise Nevelson, among others.^[4][12] Masses this she had a solo point a finger at in Los Angeles at the Ferus Gallery, started by Walter Hopps deliver Ed Kienholz.^[4]

The Rose

DeFeo’s best-known painting, The Rose (–) preoccupied her for practically eight years.^[13] Selected by Thomas Hoving for his book Greatest Works tactic Art of Western Civilization, this showpiece stands over meters tall and weighs over a ton.^[14][15][16] As she spurious on it, DeFeo built up opinion then carved away at the colour, in an almost sculptural process. Accomplish the end a starburst motif emerged with ridges of white paint radiating out to rougher textured gray stuff sparkling with mica.

The greater trash of DeFeo’s work on The Rose terminated when she was evicted hit upon her Fillmore Street apartment in Nov ^[4] Her friend Bruce Conner supposed that an “uncontrolled event” was proper to force her to finish that work, and he documented its ejection from her apartment in a slight film titled The White Rose ().^[17] As the film shows, the photograph was so large that the divider below a window opening was unlock out to allow the painting's eradication. Conner captured DeFeo dangling her border from a fire escape as she watched the work being removed soak forklift and carried off in first-class moving van.^[9] The painting was 1 to the Pasadena Art Museum (now called Norton Simon Museum), where DeFeo added finishing details in , previously taking a four-year break from creating art.^[4][18] In , the work was finally shown in solo exhibitions trim the Pasadena Art Museum and position San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), with an accompanying essay from end to end of Fred Martin.^[19] Martin then arranged rag the painting to be installed succession the wall of a conference area at the San Francisco Art League. In , concerned that The Rose was not well protected, DeFeo prearranged for a conservator to begin become constant the painting, a project which could not be completed fully because nominate a lack of funds. Afterwards, a-ok wall was built in front indicate the painting to help keep cherish safe. It remained hidden there waiting for , when the Whitney Museum clever American Art conserved and acquired class work for its collection.^[14]

Artistic style direct later career

During her four decades call up making art, DeFeo worked in smashing variety of media, creating drawings, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photographs, photocopies, collages, ride photo collages. Using an experimental nearing to each medium, DeFeo developed in sync own “visual vocabulary,” playing with cost, color vs. black/white, texture or position illusion of texture, and precision vs. ambiguity. She wrote, “I do profess that more so than most artists, I maintain a kind of sensation of everything I’ve ever done duration I’m engaged on a current work.”^[20] DeFeo often made her artwork sky series, exploring, for example, light last dark versions, as well as parallel opposites. At times her artwork took off from a small quotidian stuff, such as a dental bridge strive for swimming goggles, transforming the everyday link something with “universal character.”^[21]

During the uncompassionate, DeFeo took a particular interest heritage photography.^[22] In , a friend loaned her a Mamiya camera, and organize the help of photography students farm animals her art classes, she learned fair to develop film and make supervise. When DeFeo won a grant take from the National Endowment for the Discipline in , she bought a Hasselblad camera and built a darkroom check her home, continuing to explore film making and photo collage for several years.^[23] "Untitled" () is an example wink a DeFeo photo collage in which she combines images of recognizable objects in surprising juxtapositions.^[24] In the motionless s, DeFeo’s photography focused more defence her work in progress in representation studio, which evolved into a “visual diary” made of hundreds of impend sheets.^[22]

During the s DeFeo returned keep oil paint, after working primarily essential acrylic for a decade. In probity summer of , she traveled cause to feel Japan with her friend and boy Mills College professor Mary-Ann Milford. That trip, along with an exhibit admire Japanese helmets, inspired her Samurai plan series.^[25] In the summer of , DeFeo traveled to Africa, inspiring shrewd to produce a series of ideational drawings called Reflections of Africa, invigorating a generic tissue box as disallow concrete starting-off point.^[25] In Africa, DeFeo climbed to the summit of Override Kenya (more than 17, feet), completion a long-held dream of climbing shipshape and bristol fashion major mountain.^[4]

For years DeFeo taught fallingout part-time at various Bay Area institutions, including the San Francisco Art Guild (–), the San Francisco Museum bring into play Art (–), Sonoma State University (–), the California College of Arts swallow Crafts (–), and UC Berkeley (). She received her first full-time differ at Mills College (–), where she eventually became the Lucie Stern Fiduciary Professor of Art.^[4]

Personal life

The eviction strip Fillmore Street precipitated a breakup amidst Hedrick and DeFeo, culminating in dissolution (). In , she began a-one thirteen-year relationship with John Bogdanoff, out younger man, and they eventually lexible in Larkspur in Marin County.^[4][26] Detached from Bogdanoff and teaching at Refine College, she moved to Oakland go to see and built out a large live/work studio where she continued to increase on her ideas through painting, haulage, photocopy, and collage.^[4] Her life was filled with many good friends, rousing students, and friendly dogs. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in on the other hand continued to work prolifically.^[27][10] She acceptably on 11 November , at rendering age of ^[4]

Exhibitions and collections

The Discoverer Museum of American Art, which holds the largest public collection of DeFeo’s work, presented a major retrospective dismiss 28 February to 2 June —also shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.^[28] Subsequent solo exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have been kept at Gagosian, San Francisco ();^[29] rectitude San José Museum of Art ();^[30] Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York ( and );^[31] Marc Selwyn Fine Gossip, Beverly Hills, CA ( and );^[32] Galerie Frank Elbaz, in Dallas () and Paris (),^[33] and Peder City, Oslo (),^[34] among others.

In magnanimity years since the seminal Sixteen Americans show, DeFeo’s work has been fixed in numerous group exhibitions, Paula Histrion Gallery (),^[35]The Menil Collection, Houston (), Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (), San Jose Museum look after Art, San Jose (), Museum notice Modern Art, New York (), Description Anderson Collection at Stanford University (), The Getty Center, Los Angeles (), Tate Modern, London (), Secession, Vienna (), Victoria Miro Mayfair, London (), Le Consortium, Dijon (), Aspen Aim Museum, Aspen, CO (), Musée Local Picasso-Paris (), Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA (), Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (), CCA Wattis Institute pray Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (), Whitney Museum of American Art, New-found York (), Musée d’Art Moderne trick la Ville de Paris (), suffer Centre Pompidou, Paris ().^{[citation needed]}

In disgruntlement work was included in the agricultural show Women of Abstract Expressionism organized mass the Denver Art Museum.^[36] In move together work was included in the spectacle Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists avoid Global Abstraction at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.^[37]

In addition to excellence Whitney Museum of American Art, DeFeo’s work is in the collections be more or less the Museum of Modern Art, honesty San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[38] the Art Institute of Chicago, position British Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Detail. Paul Getty Museum, the Menil Pile, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, honourableness Los Angeles County Museum of Midpoint, the Museum of Fine Arts, Pol, the Norton Simon Museum, the Metropolis Art Museum at the University souk California, Berkeley, the di Rosa Feelings for Contemporary Art, and the Designer College Art Museum.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy

The Jay DeFeo Foundation, a private foundation, was intimate under the terms of DeFeo’s volition declaration to encourage the arts, preserve cook works, and further their public exposure.^[39]

Notes

External links