Jay Defeo: Her Tripod and Its Dress

by Elizabeth Sussman

In discussions of postwar American art, San Francisco-based artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) has been primarily remembered for her extraordinary painting, The Rose. As current explorations of DeFeo's life and art gain national momentum, DeFeo emerges as an artist who - like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg - influenced the course of American art after Abstract Expressionism, by exploiting the creative potential of collage, drawing, photography and paint in an original and provocative body of work that juxtaposes the representational with the abstract and the literal with the ambiguous. DeFeo's innovations in her choice of subject matter and in her masterful manipulation emerge in the focused selection from the mid-1970s (a mid-point in her career) presented in the current exhibition. 9x11.5", 98 pp., color and b&w illustrations.

98 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2003