Among the seventy fascinatingly varied works on view in this decades-spanning show is an untitled piece, from 1973, that meets the barest definition of a collage—it’s a single rose, cut carefully from a black-and-white photo, floating on a white background. With this breezy, refined gesture, the artist, who worked in the San Francisco Bay area until her death, in 1989, conjures her most famous painting, “The Rose,” from 1958-1966, which, as a Sisyphean two-ton grisaille relief, could not be more different.

DeFeo was after something other than a chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. For her, surrealism was not a technique, but a state of seeing and experiencing everyday life.

In dream analysis, it’s said that the familiar nightmare of one’s teeth falling out represents anxiety over the possible loss of control. Fading beauty, or an inability to communicate might cause such a dream, but so too might a more catastrophic event: an illness or an eviction, perhaps. For artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) any of these occurrences could have provoked such a night terror, and walking through Outrageous Fortune: Jay DeFeo and Surrealism at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, one can’t help but wonder if teeth dreams had plagued her. The exhibition takes as its premise the thrum of Surrealism that murmurs through DeFeo’s body of work, and the reappearance of teeth is one of several tropes that surface.

It is in the post-Rose period that DeFeo experimented with new techniques or applications, things like cameraless photography and collage. Bruce Conner, the Rat Bastard leader, had suggested that DeFeo take pictures of the “things [around her] and turn them into other stuff . . . collage things.”) As described in the exhibition’s catalog by Dana Miller, The Whitney Museum’s Director of the Collection, DeFeo’s experiments, which the artist described as play, “meant not only taking risks, but also, at key moments, sharing authorship with forces of nature, randomness, or accident.” The irony is how DeFeo would come to embrace chance after methodically working on The Rose—one work—for nearly eight years.

Featuring over 70 of the Beat generation artist’s works, “Outrageous Fortune” will showcase paintings, photographs, collages, and works on paper from Jay DeFeo’s oeuvre over the course of three decades, from 1955 to 1986. In a similar way to how the Dadaists and Surrealists invoked various symbolic emblems through unlike subjects, DeFeo’s juxtaposition of forms and mixed-media approaches messed with the role chance plays in art-making. The show will act as a teaser for New York audiences who can’t make it to Dijon, France, for a major survey of DeFeo’s work at Le Consortium.

In the career of Jay DeFeo, her astonishing painting The Rose (1958–66) casts a long shadow. Spanning almost 11 by eight feet, it has a primordial-looking surface of oil paint mixed with wood and mica so heavily built up and excavated that it weighs more than a ton. This abstract, sculptural canvas, with radiating vectors that converge at a center point, occupied DeFeo for eight years—consuming her entirely for the last five of those. The Rose acquired mythic status when the artist Bruce Conner, her close friend, filmed it being cut out of the window of DeFeo’s Fillmore Street studio in San Francisco, in 1965, then hoisted by forklift onto a truck, and transported to the Pasadena Art Museum.

This will be the gallery’s second exhibition of these artists and the first time the two will be exhibited together. The exhibition showcases the relation between the works of the artists which are based on the process of making drawings.

This installation of the DeFeo's “Samurai” series, 1986–87, begins to redress this narrative, as many of these large-format paintings on paper refute the notion of a singularly careful and slow-working painter.

Today, Jay DeFeo ranks among the better-known female artists of the era, but only after flying under the radar for many years. Best-known for her monumental painting The Rose, which is 10 feet tall, almost a foot thick, and weighs over a ton, DeFeo was the subject of a long-overdue retrospective organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012–13.

Whitney decided to open her own museum, on West Eighth Street, in 1931, and appointed Force its director. Since then, seven directors have overseen the growth of the collection, which now contains twenty-two thousand items, seventeen thousand of them works on paper. There are such touchstones as Alexander Calder’s “Circus” (1926-31), Arshile Gorky’s “The Artist and His Mother” (1926-36), Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags” (1958), Jay DeFeo’s massive relief “The Rose” (1958-66), Willem de Kooning’s “Door to the River” (1960), Nan Goldin’s slide-show installation “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1979-96), and Mike Kelley’s caustic stuffed-animal array “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” (1987). But the collection lacks depth in most major artists, with the important exception of Edward Hopper. The Whitney has the largest concentration of his art anywhere, including such paintings as “Railroad Sunset” (1929) and the storefront epiphany “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), along with more than twenty-five hundred drawings. By ever more general agreement, Hopper is this country’s painter laureate, or, as De Salvo calls him, “our Picasso.”

This exhibition--which focused on Jay DeFeo's production following her three-year hiatus from artmaking after her completion of The Rose, 1958-66, her famous, one-ton painting of a burst of white light--gathered forty-nine pieces from the last fifteen years of the artist's life, several of which were absent from her recent traveling US retrospective.  DeFeo, whos early work was animated by jazz and Beat subcultures and by the varied frequencies coursing through the San Francisco Renaissance, was also well known for her round-the-clock, sedulous-yet-playful ingenuity.  She worked quickly until the end; many of the pieces here were produced in the last four years of her life, the most industrious period of her career.

The Rose, DeFeo's sculpture-cum-painting over which she lavored for eight years, dominated discussions of her retrospective last year.  This show of drawings, photographs, and collages, free from the shadow of its myth, allows consideration of her wry improvisations and neo-Surrealist approach. 

A riveting follow-up to last year’s Jay DeFeo retrospective at the Whitney Museum, this exhibition of drawings, photographs and photocopies finds this artist moving past her ponderous masterpiece, “The Rose,” in fits and starts.

"That's why a show like the one currently up at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which homes in on her post-“Rose” output until her death in 1989, is still direly important. The gallery curators have mined DeFeo’s archives to present works never before exhibited, including photographs, photocopies, and collages, next to more well-known pieces such as “Tuxedo Junction” (1965/1974) and “Seven Pillars of Wisdom No. 6” (1989). Laid out according to subject rather than chronology, the effect is that of a forensic case study, tracing a path from the everyday objects she called her “models” to her “portraits” — incisive studies she made across media — to her paintings, where the original subject is less abstracted than obscured by the history of her experimentation and transformations."

Jay DeFeo
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
May 1-June 7

The Rose, DeFeo’s enormous sculpture-cum-painting over which she labored for eight years, dominated discussions of her Whitney retrospective last year. This show of 50 small-scale drawings, photographs and collages, free from the shadow of its myth, allows us to consider DeFeo’s wry improvisations and neo-Surrealist approach. An untitled photocollage c. 1975–76 sees a ghostly hand against a black background above an overflowing basket propped up by a silhouetted cutaway; the totem-like form makes the organic uncanny, which is one of the artist’s prevailing motifs.

DeFeo (1929–1989) became legendary for her single-minded focus in creating The Rose, her monumental abstract canvas that took eight years to complete. This show, featuring paintings, works on paper and photos, is the first to exhibit her efforts since a 2013 Whitney retrospective.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Jay DeFeo, closes June 7.
Long reduced to a footnote of 20th century art history, DeFeo (1929–1989), previously remembered largely for The Rose (1958–66), her monumental, massively thick relief painting, came roaring back into the public consciousness with her impressive 2012–13 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her current show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash continues the trend with a selection of DeFeo’s 1970s experiments in photography, an assortment of drawings and collages, and her late-in-life return to oil painting. DeFeo’s distinctive exploration of form and repetition of shape, as well as her fascination with space and depth of field, are seen throughout the exhibition. Limited to a largely gray-scale palette, save for a few sepia-toned works, the show has Dadaist undertones, especially in DeFeo’s still life photography. De-contextualized close-ups of pedestrian items like a head of cauliflower or a kitschy seashell lighting fixture take on an unsettling, almost otherworldly quality, reminding the viewer of DeFeo’s uncanny ability to create the illusion of texture and three-dimensionality even in her flat works.

"It was such a brilliant, mind-blowing exhibition," says Lucy Mitchell-Innes of the Whitney's Museum of Amercan Art's lauded 2013 Jay DeFeo retrospective, "that we were quite intimidated to follow on that."  So, for the first presentation since the blockbuster of the late Bay Area artist's AbEx-tinged work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea, the dealer confides, "we had to develop another narrative that shows a different side of Jay."  For the show, running May 1 through June 7, she assembled nearly 50 collages, drawings, paintings, and photographs from the 1960s through the 1980s that reveal DeFeo's dogged ursuit of specific formal elements across media-say, the sculptural qualities of wadded Kleenex, in one surprisingly affecting group of photographs, photocopies, and paintings. "The way she would play around with scale, fragments would take on a life of their own," notes Mitchell-Innes.  And the way the works speak to one another, she says, demonstrates "the integrity of the vision, the consistency of it-and the intensity.  Emotionally, the work is just right out there."

Blockbuster alert! Hot on the heels of the Whitneyʼs illuminating 2013 Jay DeFeo
(1929–89) retrospective, MIN is showing work from 1965 through the end of her
life. Forty-eight total pieces, folks: collage, painting, photography, photocopying(!)
and more. Not to be missed. (Pictured in the slide show is 1972's White Shadow.)

Last year’s Jay DeFeo retrospective at the Whitney Museum confirmed the Bay Area artist, who lived from 1929 to 1989, as one of postwar America’s great, unsung artistic figures. Known pretty much solely for The Rose, the sizable masterwork of a painting she labored on for eight years, from 1958 through 1966, it was revealed that she also produced spooky, spectral drawings and photographs. This will be the DeFeo Trust's first show with the gallery, and will focus on works from the 1970s and '80s, including never-before-shown photocopy works. Walead Beshty will contribute a catalogue essay.

"Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective" at the Whitney Museum of American Art among the top ten shows of the 2013, reviewed by Tyler Green.  He states, "Curator Dana Miller's exhibition was a thrill from beginning to end, from early work regularly shown on the West Coast to late paintings that almost no one has seen before."

Author and scholar Paul Sternberger reviews Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, the exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art's recent retrospective of the same name.  This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89).

The catalogue was written by Dana Miller, Curator of the Whitney's Permanent Collection, with contributions by Michael Duncan, Corey Keller, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, and Greil Marcus.

“Civilization,” Gertrude Stein says, “begins with a rose.” And also: “It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.”

You understand what she means when you stand before Jay DeFeo’s massive painting The Rose, a two-ton, twelve-feet-tall canvas sculpted in oil, wood, and mica, a bold burst of grisaille. At the Whitney Museum of Art, where the work is part of the permanent collection, it hangs like an altarpiece, the focal point of a retrospective of DeFeo’s art.

JAY DEFEO (1929-1989) is not exactly an obscure artist. A leading light of the small but thriving San Francisco art scene of the 1950s, she remains well known for creating The Rose (1958-66). 

Most artists fail in what they try to do. The reasons range from an encyclopedia of faults and mistakes to the myriad variants of bad luck. The fact is too melancholy to tempt much contemplation.

“Anything for Jay” is a phrase that Dana Miller, the curator of “Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, heard time and again when asking for research help for the show. 

The museum is taking on another difficult and sometimes discounted artist—Jay DeFeo, best known for a flower of her own (The Rose, 1958–66)—by mounting an elegant and revelatory retrospective.