The Transcendent Late Paintings of Jay DeFeo

What happens after the masterpiece? For the artist Jay DeFeo, who worked on her monumental oil painting The Rose (1958–1966) for eight years until it was nearly 11 inches thick and weighed over 2,000 pounds, the answer was clear: Do not attempt a repeat.

Instead, DeFeo experimented widely throughout the 1970s, playing with drawing and collage and photography and reworking old pieces into new ones in her Northern California studio. When she did paint, she went with acrylics. She didn’t touch oil again for almost two decades. Eventually DeFeo found her way back to oil paint, buoyed by financial stability and a hard-won confidence. The subsequent paintings she made in the 1980s represent some of the most riveting abstract work to come out …

Now, thanks to a new exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, that’s changing. The blockbuster show brings together 17 paintings made between 1982 and 1989, the year DeFeo died, too young, at 60 of lung cancer. It makes the convincing case that we don’t really know Jay DeFeo the artist without considering this late body of work.

“The paintings of the ’80s have their own vocabulary and their own transgressions,” says Leah Levy, the executive director and a trustee of the Jay DeFeo Foundation, who worked with DeFeo in those years she returned to oil. “There was this attempt to figure out a different way to have a relationship with the materials that would move her forward, rather than take her back to something that she had completed.”

Though these paintings contain that same searching quality at the heart of The Rose, they look nothing like her magnum opus. For one, DeFeo brought in fierce color—red and umber and marigold, with accents of sapphire atop muddled grays. And instead of a starburst center, these works play with complex shapes that tumble across the surface. They harken back to the bravura brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, which was the name of the game when DeFeo first entered the art world in the 1950s.

In the gallery’s main room are the large, grand canvases, with some as tall as seven or eight feet. Paintings like Verdict No. 1, Geisha II, and La Brea are jolts to the system for their use of vivid colors, but the muted palettes of Untitled (Reclining Figure) and Bride—an abstraction of a rocking chair in her studio—are no less dynamic. “You really discover so much as you spend time with them. They’re constantly revealing more to you in the best way that great abstract painting can do,” says Steve Henry, senior partner at Paula Cooper Gallery.

In the gallery’s front room, a suite of smaller works on linen, some just 10 inches tall, hang with quiet purpose. You could spend hours looking at the pockets of texture and color in any one of her Alabama Hills paintings, inspired by the landscape at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains. “You can really see every decision, you can see every brushstroke. They’re almost like photographs, or impressions,” says Jordan Stein, a San Francisco–based curator and writer who contributed the essay for the exhibition’s catalog. (He is also the author of the excellent DeFeo book Rip Tales, published in 2021.)

The work DeFeo made in the 1980s is a culmination of a career anchored by constant exploration. Though she had distinct bodies of work, “they were so influential on each other,” says Daisy Charles, director of archives and research at Paula Cooper Gallery. “By looking at particular paintings, you can identify earlier collages. And then within those collages, you can see bits of photographs, and then those photographs had little bits of other paintings. There’s this kind of constant recycling and revisiting so that in this final body of work, it’s almost like it contains everything that she did up to that point.”

DeFeo was born in New Hampshire in 1929. She moved with her parents to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1932, so her father could complete his medical degree at Stanford. Seven years later her parents divorced; she was raised mostly by her mother, a nurse, in California, with stints in Colorado with her maternal grandparents.

DeFeo took to art from an early age. A commercial-artist neighbor (named, incredibly, Michaelango) and a high school art teacher were particularly influential, and she went on to study art and art history at Berkeley. After graduating in 1950, she spent 15 months in Europe. She was particularly taken with Florence, which inspired colorful paintings she made in the early ’50s—precursors to the work she’d make 30 years later.

Back in San Francisco, DeFeo fell into the exciting Beats scene. She and her husband Wally Hedrick were there for Allen Ginsberg’s first-ever reading of “Howl,” at Six Gallery, which also showed her work. DeFeo and Hedrick’s Fillmore Street apartment was the hub of a scene that included artists like Bernice Bing, Joan Brown, and Sonia Gechtoff—who coincidentally has a show up now at the new Olney Gleason gallery, six blocks north of Paula Cooper in Chelsea.

The Bay Area in that postwar period was particularly conducive to DeFeo’s experimental approach to art. “I do think that there’s something in the atmosphere or in the soil—something about the fact that it’s at the edge of the continent that can sometimes free an artist up to take more chances, especially in the absence of the robust art market of a place like New York,” says Stein.

Toward the end of The Rose (which was so ensconced in lore it was famous before she even completed it), DeFeo was going through a hard time. She and Hedrick split. She was drinking. She was evicted from the Fillmore Street apartment—in the scheme of things maybe a good thing, as it forced an end point for The Rose—and moved to Marin County. Following a three-year break from making any art at all, she started working with smaller, scrappier materials. By the 1970s she was deep in her exploration of photography, and in 1981 she landed a teaching job at Mills College in Oakland.

Getting that Mills College job was a breakthrough. She had health insurance, a steady paycheck. The relationships she built with students like Al Wong were nourishing in ways both personal and artistic. It’s no wonder she was ready to scale the mountain of oil paint once again. “It’s a much more expressionistic, kind of a freer kind of attitude,” DeFeo once said about oil. She had missed it.

DeFeo had already made a few of her larger works in oil by the time Leah Levy started working with her. But then DeFeo began on the small paintings—arguably the more potent of the two rooms on view at Paula Cooper. “I got to witness the painstaking care she took in trying to decide what the supports would be, what the stretcher bars would be,” Levy says. “I got to watch her experiment with a number of different kinds of canvas and linen, and it was pretty amazing to understand the intensity with which she addressed all of these issues.” DeFeo took her work seriously—the materials, the ideas she was exploring. But she wasn’t precious about it.

DeFeo would have been pretty sick when she made Smile and Lie and Garnets on the Boulder (both from 1989), the latter of which lends its name to the exhibition title. Notably, both are stripped of color and instead focus on texture and feeling. They serve as counterpoints to The Rose—or maybe portals back to it. Opposite in so many ways, but infused with the same poignant grit.

“I sometimes feel like Jay DeFeo is one of those artists where there’s many artists in one,” says Charles. “She was willing to try and fail and move on and explore, right up until the end of her life.”

“Garnets on the Boulder: Jay DeFeo Paintings of the 1980s” is on view at Paula Cooper through December 13.

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