Jay DeFeo. The Mythic Rose

Portrait of Jay DeFeo, 1976.

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Jay DeFeo’s legendary painting The Rose (1958–66) is a 2,300-pound existential and expressionistic work that absorbed the artist for eight years. Its metamorphosis over that time, which for the young artist was a “building up of a vocabulary,”¹ has been compared to the allegorical tales of Sisyphus pushing his stone uphill or Penelope weaving her shroud.² Though DeFeo was making large-scale drawings of roses at the time of its conception, the origin of The Rose was not specifically a flower but the idea of a center—“an eruptive core and a vanishing inner void.”³ The painting transformed through several stylistic stages: primordial, geometric, and baroque. Each phase could have been called a finished work on its own,⁴ but DeFeo was developing her technique of building up forms and scraping away at them—at times, even down to the raw canvas; in time it became more like a sculpture the artist “hacked away at.”⁵ Though photographs of the work were published throughout its making, The Rose was exhibited only twice during DeFeo’s lifetime before it was stored behind a conference room wall and plastered over at the San Francisco Art Institute.