John Yau

Jay DeFeo

In this new monograph on DeFeo, John Yau looks at the breadth of the artist's work and her broad range of interests and influences, while the book focuses on her late work, paintings of the 1980s as well as the exceptional corpus of drawings of the 1980s and her photographic oeuvre of the 1970s. It thus complements the book published on the occasion of her Whitney Museum retrospective in 2013.Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Edward Kienholz, and Michael McClure.Although best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958-1966), DeFeo worked in a wide range of media and produced an astoundingly diverse and compelling body of work over four decades. DeFeo's unconventional approach to materials and her intensive, physical method make her a unique figure in postwar American art.English and German text.

Chiaroscuro

Jane Green

Leah Levy

"A gorgeous and moving book about a grand American masterpiece."—Thomas Hoving "Is The Rose erupting or imploding, or is it doing both simultaneously—swallowing up and disgorging a life, an era, an entire mythos? The current volume, at last grappling with the whole of Jay DeFeo's great billowing fever dream of a masterpiece, plugs a gaping hole in the history of contemporary American art, and does so with a sense of moment and scale and flair worthy of its mind-blowing subject."—Lawrence Weschler "An original and highly effective combining of 'readings' of the work of Jay DeFeo, a leading figure of the Beat generation. The various perspectives of the authors come smoothly together in their recognition of her supreme artistic ambition and desire to approach transcendence through art. New images and insights demythologize The Rose, now a genuine icon of the heroic abstract expressionist ethos identified with the era, enabling its creator to emerge as an individual and thereby richly enhancing our understanding of both the art and the artist."—Paul J. Karlstrom, editor of On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950 "Eight years in the making, Jay DeFeo's The Rose was hidden behind a wall for over two decades and uncovered only after the artist's death. This book presents an account of its remarkable birth, burial, rescue, and resurrection through the words of conservators, curators, art historians, friends of the artist, and critics. The volume's sensitively written essays bring The Rose back to life in all its enigmatic complexity. It is a story unparalleled in contemporary art history, by turns riveting, heartbreaking, and exhilarating."—Eleanor Heartney, author of Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads

Jay DeFeo

About

Books

Join the club