A groundbreaking exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery is reshaping our understanding of artist Jay DeFeo through her rarely seen late paintings from the 1980s. The show, titled "Garnets on the Boulder: Jay DeFeo Paintings of the 1980s," brings together 17 paintings created between 1982 and 1989, the year DeFeo died of lung cancer at age 60. These works represent some of the most compelling abstract art to emerge from the American postwar period, yet many have seldom been displayed publicly, especially in New York.
DeFeo's journey to these final masterpieces began after completing her monumental work "The Rose" (1958-1966), an oil painting she labored on for eight years until it reached nearly 11 inches in thickness and weighed over 2,000 pounds. Rather than attempting to replicate this acclaimed piece, DeFeo chose a completely different path. Throughout the 1970s, she experimented extensively with drawing, collage, and photography while reworking older pieces into new creations in her Northern California studio.
The artist deliberately avoided oil paint for almost two decades after "The Rose," turning instead to acrylics when she did paint. According to Leah Levy, executive director and trustee of the Jay DeFeo Foundation who worked with DeFeo during her return to oil painting, "The paintings of the 80s have their own vocabulary and their own transgressions. 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."
When DeFeo finally returned to oil paint in the 1980s, buoyed by newfound financial stability and hard-won confidence, she created works that bore little resemblance to "The Rose." These later paintings introduced fierce colors including red, umber, and marigold, accented with sapphire atop muted grays. Instead of the starburst center that defined her earlier masterpiece, these works featured complex shapes tumbling across the surface, harking back to the bold brushwork of Abstract Expressionism that dominated the art world when DeFeo first emerged in the 1950s.
The gallery's main room showcases the large, grand canvases, some reaching seven or eight feet in height. Paintings such as "Verdict No. 1," "Geisha II," and "La Brea" deliver visual jolts through their vivid colors, while works with muted palettes like "Untitled (Reclining Figure)" and "Bride" - an abstraction of a rocking chair in her studio - prove equally dynamic. Steve Henry, senior partner at Paula Cooper Gallery, notes, "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."
In the gallery's front room, a collection of smaller works on linen hangs with quiet purpose, some measuring just 10 inches tall. These include her "Alabama Hills" paintings, inspired by the landscape at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where viewers could spend hours examining the intricate pockets of texture and color. Jordan Stein, a San Francisco-based curator and writer who contributed the essay for the exhibition catalog and authored the 2021 book "Rip Tales" about DeFeo, observes, "You can really see every decision, you can see every brushstroke. They're almost like photographs, or impressions."
DeFeo's 1980s work represents the culmination of a career anchored by constant exploration and cross-pollination between different media. Daisy Charles, director of archives and research at Paula Cooper Gallery, explains, "Though she had distinct bodies of work, they were so influential on each other. 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."
Born in New Hampshire in 1929, DeFeo moved with her parents to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1932 when her father enrolled in medical school at Stanford. After her parents divorced seven years later, she was raised primarily by her mother, a nurse, in California, with periods spent in Colorado with her maternal grandparents. DeFeo showed artistic inclinations from an early age, influenced by a commercial artist neighbor named Michelangelo and a high school art teacher. She went on to study art and art history at Berkeley, graduating in 1950 before spending 15 months in Europe, where Florence particularly captivated her and inspired colorful paintings that served as precursors to her work three decades later.
Returning to San Francisco, DeFeo immersed herself in the vibrant Beats scene alongside her husband Wally Hedrick. The couple attended Allen Ginsberg's first-ever reading of "Howl" at Six Gallery, which also exhibited DeFeo's work. Their Fillmore Street apartment became the hub of an artistic community that included Bernice Bing, Joan Brown, and Sonia Gechtoff, who coincidentally has a current show at the new Olney Gleason gallery in Chelsea. Stein suggests the Bay Area's postwar atmosphere was particularly conducive to DeFeo's experimental approach: "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."
Toward the end of her work on "The Rose," DeFeo experienced personal difficulties. Her marriage to Hedrick ended, she struggled with drinking, and she was eventually evicted from the Fillmore Street apartment - an event that, while traumatic, forced her to complete "The Rose." She relocated to Marin County and took a three-year break from making art entirely. When she resumed creating in the 1970s, she focused on smaller, more manageable materials and delved deeply into photography. In 1981, a significant breakthrough came when she secured a teaching position at Mills College in Oakland.
The Mills College job provided DeFeo with health insurance, a steady income, and meaningful relationships with students like Al Wong that proved both personally and artistically nourishing. This stability gave her the confidence to tackle oil paint once again. As DeFeo herself noted about the medium, "It's a much more expressionistic, kind of a freer kind of attitude." She had genuinely missed working with oil.
Levy, who began working with DeFeo after she had already completed several larger oil works, witnessed the artist's meticulous approach to her smaller paintings - arguably the more compelling of the two rooms in the Paula Cooper exhibition. "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 recalls. "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." While DeFeo took her work seriously - from materials to concepts - she wasn't precious about the process.
Among DeFeo's final works were "Smile and Lie" and "Garnets on the Boulder," both completed in 1989 when the artist was likely already seriously ill. These paintings, stripped of color and focused instead on texture and emotion, serve as counterpoints to "The Rose" or perhaps portals back to it. Though opposite in many ways, they are infused with the same poignant intensity that characterized her earlier masterpiece.
As Charles reflects, "I sometimes feel like Jay DeFeo is one of those artists where there's many artists in one. She was willing to try and fail and move on and explore, right up until the end of her life." The exhibition "Garnets on the Boulder: Jay DeFeo Paintings of the 1980s" runs through December 13 at Paula Cooper Gallery, offering visitors a rare opportunity to experience these transcendent late works that reveal new depths in one of America's most innovative abstract artists.
