Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2013/05/letter-from-new-york-jay-defeo-a-retrospective-at-the-whitney-museum-of-art/
A review of Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view through June 2, 2013.
"The current retrospective... is not only about The Rose, though it is the heart of the installation... this show provides a broader view of the artist and demonstrates the range of DeFeo’s considerable oeuvre. Her early work, The Rose, and her late work, when seen together, argue persuasively for her inclusion in the Abstract Expressionist canon."
"The exhibition opens abruptly with the revelation that DeFeo was a natural talent from the outset. She worked with inspiration and purpose from the beginning. Her early work, on view in the first gallery, suggests an innate religiosity, a penchant for mixing media, and a Picasso-like facility with forms – natural skills she cultivated throughout her career. A series of early painted cruciforms morph into birds and kites. These 'kites,' are freely painted with a joyful touch, yet they are also un-flyable and foreboding."
"One leaves Jay DeFeo’s retrospective startled at how flawed the first draft of art history can be. It is heartening, however, to know that with this exhibition a great painter will begin to receive the attention she deserves. DeFeo and The Rose live up to the myth."
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://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2013/02/10/on-being-a-lady/
Mira Schor blogs about the exhibition To Be a Lady: Forty-five Women in the Arts, curated by Jason Andrew, at at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, on view through March 22, 2013.
Schor writes: "I figure that since the show is divided into two parts, installed along two separate sections of the space, with one side featuring the works of women artists who are deceased, and the other side featuring those of us still among the living, I feel that I can safely recommend the dead without incurring controversy among the other living artists in the show or referring to my own work in it or the ramifications of the word 'lady, ' which I know has stirred some controversy. Curator Jason Andrew of Norte Maar has assembled some terrific work in this show, a diverse group of works by notable artists and artists that some may be less familiar with, and in each case has included a very good example of the artist’s work, and in some cases quite a surprising one. Again, I am just talking about the dead. The works are grouped in open bays or booths, creating in effect small mini-exhibitions with some interesting synergies."
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://www.supremefiction.com/theidea/2012/11/gallery-chronicle-november-2012.html
James Panero reviews the exhibition To Be a Lady: Forty-five Women in the Arts, curated by Jason Andrew, at at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, on view through January 18, 2013.
Panero writes: "It’s too bad that the language of music cannot apply to visual art. We all know there’s a difference between a tenor and a soprano, yet we value them equally. In fact, opera is rather dull without both. The same holds true for the voices of painters or sculptors. With its concentration of abstract artists, 'To be a Lady' suggests, in particular, why women’s voices have been essential to the evolution of modernism. Even without pivotal figures on display like Helen Frankenthaler, the lady who made the men look like boys, 'To be a Lady' suggests how women have advanced an abstract language that is thankfully free of distracting male quavers. Without macho bluster, the works here can settle into contemplative, often symmetrical compositions."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/58498/city-of-women/
Thomas Micchelli writes about the exhibition To be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts curated by Jason Andrew, organized by Norte Maar, on view at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, New York through January 18, 2013.
To be a Lady, Micchelli notes, is a show of "startling scale, ambition and quality: a museum-caliber exhibition unenclosed by museum walls." He continues: "One of the ironies of To Be a Lady (implicit in its title, which Andrew asserts is meant as a provocation) is that the pieces derived from traditional notions of domesticity — 'women’s work' in the not-gender-neutral term — are often the most aggressive... Aggressiveness is on full display in conventional media as well, with tough and jagged paintings by Pat Passlof, Elizabeth Condon, Grace Hartigan, Mira Schor, Brooke Moyse and, with a marked acidity, Elizabeth Murray."
