Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) continues to inspire generations of artists with her astonishingly diverse and innovative range of works, including paintings, collages, drawings and photographs. The exhibition features a rich selection of paintings on paper that traces Jay DeFeo’s revelatory art-making of the early 1950s. Beginning with her arrival in Paris on a post-graduate grant in the fall of 1951, through her extended stay in Florence in 1952 where she produced an astounding body of energized Abstract Expressionist works, to her return to her Berkeley studio in 1953, these works track the creation of DeFeo’s palette and visual vocabulary that would inform her work for decades to come.

After time on the road in France, London, Morocco, Spain and Italy, including her crawling through prehistoric caves along the way, DeFeo settled for six months in Florence, where the pent-up visual experiences of historic and post-war Europe bloomed in an extraordinary burst of works. Working in a rented apartment in the Pensione Bertolini in Florence for six months and making her own tempera, DeFeo came alive with the full sense of herself as an artist, stating that “It was during the Florence period, and it started in Paris, that I really came into my own...”

The large-scale works on paper in this exhibition have all the energy and immediacy of DeFeo’s canvases. Abstract shapes counterbalance gestural brushwork as the artist experiments with the duality of organic rhythms and geometric form, refinement and expressionism. Clifford Ross muses in his essay featured in the accompanying exhibition booklet: “In these works, we see her dancing back and forth between these two instincts. We watch as her brush drips, scrubs, doubles-back, leaps, circles, and declares—the paint gathering itself toward abstract configurations that emote on her behalf. And we watch as her wrist makes the same moves but with different intent, to let us see the world with her. Windows, water, buildings, trees, animals—and perhaps even spirits.”

DeFeo’s art is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York, British Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Menil Collection, Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. DeFeo’s works can also be seen in Los Angeles in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Norton Simon Museum, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, and J. Paul Getty Museum. In 2013, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, featuring more than 150 seminal works by the artist. On June 28, 2019, the Whitney Museum of American Art opens The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965 which will include DeFeo’s monumental work, The Rose which will remain on view through June 2020.