Link to Post:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/05/14/romance-of-the-rose-on-jay-defeo/
Yevgeniya Traps reviews the exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view through June 2, 2013.
Traps writes: "In some ways, [DeFeo's] work echoed the Beats: The Rose, in its making, is one continuous poem, bound up with the artist’s body no less than Ginsberg’s long poem, which takes the writer’s breath as the singular measure of its lines." Traps adds that the "triumphantly speaks to [DeFeo's] prolific imagination, her abundance of technique. The Rose, with its built-in mythology, its gargantuan ambition and stunning payoff, hogs the limelight, but other, smaller works also shine."
Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/0-WeXDG2qbY
James Kalm video blogs a walk-through of the exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, New York, on view through June 2, 2013.
Kalm's video provides a unique, virtual close-up look at DeFeo's masterpiece The Rose. As Kalm notes the show "allows viewers the opportunity to see the wider spectrum of works produced by this uniquely dedicated artist that include, drawing, sculpture, photography, collage and jewelry."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/hassel-smith-a-free-spiri_b_2545493.html
John Seed blogs about the painter Hassel Smith (1915-2007) on the occasion of an exhibition of Smith's work at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco and the publication of a new monograph on the artist edited by Petra Giloy-Hirtz.
Seed writes: "Smith first gained notice as a representational painter in the 1940s: his works from that period have an energy and graphic insistence that predicts some of the qualities of the Bay Area Figurative style that his friend David Park would pioneer a few years later. In the 50's Smith -- who was very close to Clyfford Still -- developed the feisty calligraphic abstract paintings that earned him his reputation as an 'underground legend.' ...The peripatetic life that followed after Smith left Los Angeles -- he was back and forth between California and England for many years -- combined with his constant stylistic tinkering, meant that the art world never quite managed to get a read on Smith during his lifetime."
Link to Post:
http://dailyserving.com/2013/01/jay-defeo-spatial-relations/
Rob Marks writes about the last works of painter Jay DeFeo on view in a retrospective of DeFeo's work at the San Francisco Museum of Moden Art through February 3, 2013.
Marks notes: "If you back your way into the Jay DeFeo exhibition... you’ll discover, as I did, a group of five oil paintings in the final gallery. The works are small by today’s standards of monumentality and smaller still by the standards of DeFeo’s most famous work, The Rose... all created in 1989—the year of the last big San Francisco earthquake and the year DeFeo died of lung cancer. The earthquake gave no notice of its imminence, but the intimacy of these paintings, their seeming modesty, might be interpreted to represent DeFeo’s attempt to contain the uncertainty of the time, an attempt to ground herself in an ungrounded world.[1] But for me the paintings demonstrate something very different—something that might be said to characterize all of DeFeo’s work."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63065/the-rose-is-not-a-rose/
John Yau considers the work of painter Jay DeFeo. A retrospective of DeFeo's work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through February 3, 2012. The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York from February 28 - June 2, 2013.
Yau writes: "DeFeo was a religious painter in secular clothing that wanted to integrate the sacred and the profane. Her works repeatedly suggest that one never quite escapes dirt and decay. At times, there is something grim and joyless running through her work, which is another reason why it strikes me as more medieval than anything we associate with the Renaissance. Paradoxically, in the drawings there is a lightness of touch that folds another level of feeling into them. DeFeo seems to have lived a messy life on a number of levels, often saving things most of us would throw away — the handle of a broken coffee cup, the discarded orthopedic cast worn by her dog wore when he had a broken leg, and the Christmas trees she kept while living on Fillmore. These things would become inspirations for various artworks. In them one senses DeFeo’s belief in talismans and occult power."
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 30, 2012
Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 3, 2013. It will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from February 28 - June 2, 2013.
Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958-66; oil with wood and mica on canvas; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, and purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation; © 2012 The Jay DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jay DeFeo's reputation as an imporatant painter was established before the eight year period (1958-1966) in which she poured her entire vision and energy into a single work -The Rose. Perhaps the most mythic of the great Abstract Expressionist paintings, The Rose rivals masterworks by Pollock, Still, or Rothko. In 1959 DeFeo refused the invitation to exhibit The Rose in Dorothy Miller's 16 Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, choosing instead to work on the painting for seven more years.
DeFeo remarked at the time:
"Only by chancing the ridiculous, can I hope for the sublime." 1
In 2003, curator Marla Prather succinctly captured the scope of DeFeo’s commitment to the work:
“[DeFeo] was twenty-nine years old when she began the painting, turned thirty-seven the year she completed it, and reached forty before she began making art again... After 1974, then the painting was encased in plaster, she never saw the work again...” 2
The two videos below are part of the Voices and Images of California Art series produced by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the first video, Bruce Conner discusses the development of The Rose. Conner famously documented the removal of the painting from DeFeo's apartment in his 1967 film The White Rose.
Link to Post:
http://www.squarecylinder.com/2012/11/jay-defeo-hosfelt-2/
David M. Roth reviews the recent exhibition Jay DeFeo: Mechanics at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Roth writes: "DeFeo understood the transformative power of combining different media. Her assemblages of cut-up photos made on a copy machine yield some of the show’s highlights. The trio of images in which she tops the shape of an angel (originally created by Bruce Conner) with vacuum cleaner heads and a light bulb show how tools become extensions of the body. Likewise, her three-part transformation of a tripod – which morphs from something resembling a half-clothed human figure to an aorta to a space ship – feels like a stop-motion conjuring act, as does so much else in the show."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/article/richard-diebenkorn-a-door-opened/
Ashley West writes about Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings after a recent visit to the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at the Cororan Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through September 23, 2012.
West recalls his first exposure to Diebenkorn's paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1991: "A door was opened and it dawned on me that here was an approach to painting that was both measured and free – on the one hand the geometric structure was alive, dynamic, felt, and on the other the freedom of brushwork and colour was intensified through containment. These paintings were rigorous in their abstraction and presence, while expressing a sublime feeling for landscape. They seemed to epitomise for me painting in its purest sense, and I was compelled to explore what he was doing through my own work. The geometry was important, and in the first paintings I would rule out a grid as a starting point, but this was something to work from or against. The key seemed to be in the extent to which one could dissolve or rework statements, placing more emphasis on the process of search rather than accepting something as final too soon."
Link to Post:
http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/diebenkorns-fields-of-silence/
Deborah Barlow writes about the her experiences viewing Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. through Septmber 23, 2012.
Barlow notes that a "facet of this work and this artist that is important to not overlook is what Ocean Park has come to say about Diebenkorn himself. He had a dogged commitment to his own vision of things. He wasn’t belligerent or a contrarian, but he stubbornly followed his own path. In a filmed interview that accompanies the show, Diebenkorn answers a question about who the audience for his work is by stating, 'I paint for an 'ideal viewer.' ' After a brief pause he wryly added, 'And that ideal viewer just may be me.' "
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/off-the-cuff-and-on-the-money-richard-diebenkorn/
An essay on the achievements of Richard Diebenkorn, republished by Mario Naves on the occasion of the exhibition the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. through September 23, 2012.
Naves writes: "Matisse is the crucial source for the Ocean Park pictures. Not a few observers, after visiting the Matisse in Morocco exhibition at MOMA in 1990, remarked upon the similarity of the backdrop for Zorah on the Terrace (1912) to Diebenkorn's paintings. It is a not adventitious historical rhyme, as Diebenkorn would have been the first to admit. Yet to claim that he did little more than finesse (and fret over) Matisse for almost thirty years is to mistake a profound engagement with tradition for accomplished hackwork. With their pensive harmonies and stoic elegance, the Ocean Park paintings divulge their antecedents without reiterating them... Diebenkorn knew that the hurdle of tradition is not to recapitulate history, but to make tradition speak in a form that is as individual as it is contemporary. He also knew when it needed prodding. By transmuting his forebears into something personal and fresh, Diebenkorn claimed his status as an unapologetic modernist."
