Jay DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-1966) went on public display 28 June 2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of their summer collection show ‘Selections from 1900 to 1965’. The photo below is from the Whitney’s Instagram. They wrote, “Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our preparators raising The Rose by JayDeFeo (1929–1989). She spent eight years making this monumental artwork, which weighs 2,590 pounds and is approximately 11 by 7.5 feet and 1 foot thick. Installing The Rose requires four to six people, and the special equipment does all of the lifting. [Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 95.170 ©️ 2019 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.]”
In the early 1980s I spent two years sitting, periodically, in a particular room at the San Francisco Art Institute, for seminars or meetings of some type, well aware that a few feet from me, sealed up for over a decade behind a wall, sat hidden this legendary, notorious, monumental (and even, perhaps, monstrous) painting that weighs over a ton with paint that may not, deep inside the center form, be entirely dry. That it was finally rescued and exhibited is such a pleasure, as it was haunting to me in those days to think of this extraordinary work shut away like that, forgotten by so many.
“It was hauled into the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, to a room with a slightly hollow, institutional feel, an impersonal place of long tables, brushed aluminium chairs, ungracious light, and sensible flooring,” wrote Martha Sherrill in A Magazine Curated by Rodarte. “For such a bold painting, and a colossus, The Rose spent many years there largely disregarded. Bolted to a wall of the McMillan Conference Room, it became a monumental witness to the mundane, a silent presence at faculty meetings, student bull sessions, symposia, and slide lectures when the overhead lights were shut off and the room darkened and all human attention was turned to images of other paintings, other works by other artists, The Rose was strangely easy to forget.”
Here’s a video from the Whitney about the entombment:
The story I heard back then – and I heard it from DeFeo’s contemporaries and colleagues who were witnesses to all of this – DeFeo went a little mad with this painting. Whether the madness came first and manifested itself in this work, or the work took her over like something out of a Poe short story, who knows, but it happened, and the painting became a dominating beast in her apartment.
“At first, it was called Deathrose,” writes Yevgeniya Traps in The Paris Review. “DeFeo began working on the painting in 1958 and did not stop until eight years later. The rose is, in Greek mythology, associated with Aphrodite, who is often shown with roses garlanding her hair. It is the flower that most readily stands in for the female body, for female sexuality. But DeFeo’s Rose is not the bloom of purity, not the blush of first desire. It is more vagina dentata, an alluring but dangerous trap, a pleasure and a menace. It is easy, looking at this monumental painting, to imagine just how DeFeo came to be so relentlessly committed to it. You cannot simply walk past it, cannot cast a passing glance. The Rose demands attention. DeFeo worked on it every day, adding and scraping paint away, then doing it again, over and over and over. It was her Moby-Dick, her Godot.”
The only reason she actually stopped working on it was because she and her husband Wally Hedrick lost the lease on their apartment and it had to be moved. Click on the image of Jay DeFeo above to see a four-minute piece from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the painting and the day it moved, as described by her friend Bruce Connor. Connor famously captured that day in his own film The White Rose (1967). In his narration for the SFMOMA film, Connor describes the complex emotions, the tension and the relief, of that day.
Trap notes, “DeFeo died in 1989, at the age of sixty. She worked until the very end, the scale of the art smaller, but the compositions no less thoughtful, no less lovely.”
Update on me and The Rose
In early December 2021 we went into the city to see the Jasper Johns retrospective at The Whitney, roam around on the The Little Island, and go uptown to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. After immersing ourselves in the great Johns works, we saw a fantastic one-person show by Jennifer Packer, and then a floor devoted to selections from the museum’s permanent collection. I looked over to see my wife wildly gesturing me to join her on the other side of the gallery. It was The Rose, still installed, still a conservator’s nightmare, still a fascinating and intimidating presence and testament to obsession. (“Do you think I would call you over here for something trivial?” Jill asked.) After two years of sitting just a few feet from the painting when it was entombed at the San Francisco Art Institute, it only took just shy of four decades for me to finally see it in real life. I’m pretty sure it recognized my voice and took comfort from that.
Original post published on JRIrwin.com and LinkedIn June 2019. Updated December 2021.