Jay DeFeo and The Rose is the long-awaited monograph dedicated solely to this artist and her best-known painting. Its eleven essays from a prestigious roster of authors work together to situate DeFeo’s achievements within American postwar art, and its thirteen color plates and seventy-eight black-and-white photographs sustain these texts and enhance the reader’s experience. Challenging art-historical essays by her biographer Richard Cándida-Smith and art critic Carter Ratcliff are particularly significant contributions to the body of DeFeo scholarship. The inclusion of Lucy Lippard, whose essay positions the artist within the context of the critic’s previous writing, is impressive. The entries by Martha Sherrill and David Ross are informative and a pleasure to read, as are Niccolo Caldararo’s fascinating account of the conservation of The Rose and Marla Prather’s foreword. Bill Berkson and Greil Marcus, both gifted writers, have written compelling essays on DeFeo here, as they have elsewhere.

In their introduction to Jay DeFeo and The Rose, editors Jane Green and Leah Levy remark that “In some ways, the legend of The Rose did a disservice to the appreciation of DeFeo’s art by trapping it in a cultural dream, in which most of her oeuvre was consigned to backdrop. Yet without that myth sustaining the memory of a great work, The Rose might have been lost” (4). The basic plotline goes something like this: Just as DeFeo was receiving national attention for her work, she began a painting to which she became so devoted that she worked on virtually nothing else for the next eight years. The painting, first entitled Deathrose, then The White Rose, and, ultimately, simply The Rose, is an enormous canvas with a startling accretion of paint, the appearance of which most closely approximates that of carved concrete. By the time it was completed (more out of necessity than by choice), it weighed nearly a ton, DeFeo was out more than $5,000 for paint, and any trace of her once-burgeoning celebrity had vanished.

This relationship between the painting-as-object and the painting-as-myth is a key issue. Detectable in every essay, it becomes in many ways the central theme of the book. Sadly, as the weight of the myth suggests, DeFeo is sometimes overshadowed by The Rose. If this book, as is its aim, helps to bring DeFeo’s Rose into the canon of major works of the twentieth century, perhaps the field will open up for additional scholarship on the artist, her formation, and her circle.

Cándida-Smith’s essay comes closest to positioning DeFeo in relation to her oeuvre by looking at the recurrent themes of “opening, emergence, separation, and ray” (130) throughout her work. The Rose stands as “the most complete synthesis of her explorations into mark, form, and field” (128), situated chronologically at the center of a career that continued to experiment with the same reductive formal vocabulary for decades to come. Cándida-Smith deftly suggests the psychological significance of each of these formal elements to DeFeo, though his (psycho)analysis often seems based in discourse rather than in actual evidence.

Walter Hopps is the only contributor who knew both DeFeo and The Rose intimately at the time of its creation, and his short essay is unique, alternating between reminiscence and analysis, much as his relationship to DeFeo alternated between friend and curator/patron. His inclusion in this collection does raise the question: Where are the other first-hand accounts? Though each author here has some sort of connection to or involvement with DeFeo and/or The Rose, the voices of the artist’s peers, many of whom have publicly discussed the topic in the past, are conspicuously absent.

Placed in the middle of the book, a short essay by Sandra Phillips and a portfolio of photographs, which includes images of successive stages of The Rose taken over a decade, are among the highlights of the publication. When one thinks of the photographs of various phases of Willem de Kooning’s Woman, or of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica—two twentieth-century masterpieces whose earlier versions are almost as well known as the final, completed painting—one can only hope that these images of DeFeo and The Rose capture the public imagination in the same way.

Marcus’s entry uses DeFeo’s devotion to The Rose to emphasize the relationship between art and life, which he rightly acknowledges as one of the (con)founding characteristics of the avant-garde. He ultimately decides that the “only absolute work of art is self-destruction” (108). Whether or not one agrees with this conclusion, it is convincingly argued, despite its melodrama. Berkson speaks to the same issue when he notes that the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s Sixteen Americans exhibition of 1959–60—in which DeFeo and her husband, painter Wally Hedrick, were featured—was the occasion for Robert Rauschenberg’s statement, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two)” (47). The art-life conundrum is central to The Rose, a painting that, as many point out, DeFeo worked on while it was wedged into a bay window of the apartment she shared with Hedrick—significantly, the living room window. It is fascinating to imagine not only the eight-year project of working solely on one painting, but also the experience of living one’s life day in and day out with a work that has such an insistent presence.

Ratcliff’s essay is a working demonstration of some of the ways in which DeFeo and The Rose “confound historiography” (7). He begins by trying to provide an account of the painting using the formalist language that was the critical vogue of the 1950s: “Surely The Rose can stand up to this treatment. But why should it?” (150). Using Roger Fry’s voice, he sticks to “pure form” and offers us a page or so of obdurate formalist analysis before concluding that “Up against the limits of description, I feel suspended…. The trance is broken by the intrusion of a voice, the antiformalist insistence that works of art are by nature expressive, informative, charged with political meanings—anything but purely visual” (152). Confounded, perhaps, but strangely at peace with it, Ratcliff continues: “Perhaps pure form is arbitrary form. This is a troubling possibility, yet it does not trouble me as much as it should when I am face to face with The Rose” (151–52). It is the irreconcilable tension between the visual object and the “expressive, informative,” even “political” aspects of The Rose that produce its endless openness as an object of study and wonder.

Caldararo, chief conservator of The Rose, writes of the monumental and scientifically complex process of the painting’s conservation in language that a layperson can understand, without oversimplification or condescension. Caldararo has also worked on other paintings by DeFeo and knew her personally; therefore his essay is rounded out with reminiscences of the artist and her concerns about the life of The Rose and other works. Perhaps most importantly, his scientific evidence dispels a number of myths and assumptions about The Rose and DeFeo’s process. For instance, x-rays reveal that the paint contains no beads, wire, or other jewelry-making materials, which she is said to have buried in the layers of paint, nor did it turn up the famous strand of pearls, also supposedly hidden (though the book points out in several places that DeFeo repeatedly scraped the painting back down to canvas in order to begin again, and the imbedded “treasures” may have been lost at those points). DeFeo’s health problems and the cancer that led to her death are frequently attributed to the effects of lead poisoning from the paint used in The Rose. As a safety measure, then, Caldararo had the lead content of various samples tested. He writes, “We took the samples to Harlan Associates for analysis, and several days later a curious report arrived, showing that the paint samples had a very low lead content. If the lead content of all of The Rose was indeed as low as the tests indicated, it challenged yet another myth” (114).

Bolded quotations by DeFeo on a number of subjects appear between the essays and throughout the chronology; these quotes provide a real sense of DeFeo’s voice, highlighting her artistic philosophy as well as offering the merest glimpse at her well-known sense of humor and irreverence. Finally, Judith Dunham’s chronology of “Rose-related events and dates, with a brief noting of other significant moments in DeFeo’s life and career” (7) is almost storylike, not only interesting enough to read on its own, but also an indispensable reference tool as one reads through the book.

Jay DeFeo and The Rose will surely generate interest in the artist and her oeuvre and inspire future research and scholarship. One area left open is the immediate context in which the painting was created; little is done here to situate the work in relation to the prolific production of San Francisco’s artistic subculture during the 1950s. At present, the authors attempt to place DeFeo within the larger national and international art world (Berkson) or within the parameters of a New York– and Los Angeles–based feminist movement (Lippard); there is little discussion of her influence on, her commitment to, and her friendships with many interesting artists and poets of the period. Berkson’s essay does address some of kinship between DeFeo’s work and that of Hedrick, but only in relation to their inclusion in Sixteen Americans. And while almost every essay mentions Bruce Conner’s The White Rose, a closer look at this film and his other works related to DeFeo and The Rose would benefit the body of scholarship on both artists. Disregarding DeFeo’s peer group denies us the opportunity to understand the influence she exerted, not just what she received: Conner not only made a film about her work, but also created an assemblage entitled Homage to Jay DeFeo; Manuel Neri credits DeFeo with providing the impetus for his work with plaster; Wallace Berman made photographs of DeFeo and The Rose, which he inscribed with his signature Hebrew characters, as well as included her work in his “journal” Semina—the list could go on. Of the numerous images in the book, only three are not by or of DeFeo and/or The Rose; these are artworks by Eva Hesse, Lee Lozano, and Lee Bontecou, rather than of her Bay Area coterie. Nevertheless, the present volume, along with two wonderful publications that address the artistic subculture of 1950s San Francisco—Cándida-Smith’s Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Rebecca Solnit’s Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990)—brilliantly set the stage for future investigations of the often marginalized West Coast artists.

Beside The Rose: Selected Works by Jay DeFeo is an intimate show organized by Dana Miller, associate curator of postwar art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, to coincide with the release of the book. On display are eighteen works by DeFeo (paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, and sketches executed between 1956 and 1977) and four photographs of DeFeo by Wallace Berman. The centerpiece of DeFeo’s first solo show at a New York museum, is, of course, The Rose, which was exhibited only twice between its completion in 1967 and its acquisition and conservation by the Whitney in 1995; it has been shown only three times since. As its title suggests, the exhibition is also a chance to provide a fuller sense of DeFeo’s oeuvre and a larger context for The Rose. The wall text is minimal, supplying just enough biographical information that the viewer who is not familiar with the story of The Rose gets a sense of why such a fuss is being made over this impressive painting. The works are largely left to stand on their own, but the working sketches and source photographs for most of the larger pieces offer a silent visual narrative. The majority of works date from the 1970s, but three significant large-scale pieces—The Eyes, Apparition, and Applaud the Black Fact—are from the 1950s, as are Berman’s photographs and the two working drawings for The Rose.

Entering the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery, one is confronted with The Eyes (1958), DeFeo’s massive pencil drawing. Inspired by a photograph taken of herself and inscribed with lines from the poet Philip Lamantia (“Tell him I have eyes only for Heaven as I look at you Queen Mirror of the Heavenly Court”), the work establishes DeFeo’s relationship to the Beat poetry scene in San Francisco and sets off a number of ongoing themes. The image makes clear her concern with the act of seeing as it relates to the self and the projection of subjectivity. The rays that emanate from the center of each pupil—a visual element that occurs in Apparition (1956), Cabbage Rose (1975), and After Image (1970), as well as in The Rose itself—are the impetus for Cándida-Smith’s reading in the book. Crescent Bridge I (1970–72) and Crescent Bridge II (1970–72), both in the Whitney’s collection, turn from the eyes to the mouth. These large paintings and their preparatory drawings are culled from the body: they depict her dentures, odd objects that DeFeo metamorphoses into pure abstraction. Transformation is something at which the artist is extremely adept; she does the same thing in Untitled (Water Goggles) and September Blackberries, in which small mundane objects are turned into powerful abstract images. Hung in adjoining corners, Crescent Bridge I and Crescent Bridge II and September Blackberries seem to share a dialogue, a before and after, perhaps, as September Blackberries is based on her missing molars.

Cabbage Rose (1975) is the latest dated painting in the show, but among all of the works it is situated in the middle of the curator’s established visual chronology, offering a segue from the exploding-center imagery that it shares with The Eyes, After Image, Apparition, and The Rose to the Crescent Bridge paintings, which have an almost identical palette and paint handling: slick, rich, velvety-black sheens of indeterminate, liquidlike depth contrast with chalky-white and cement-gray surface-bound passages. Like the book, the exhibition places an emphasis on DeFeo’s little-known interest in and dedication to photography. Included are some never-before-seen photographs and photocollages that illustrate the extent to which photography affected her painting. These images and the working sketches in the exhibition also reveal DeFeo’s classical, thoughtful, and measured approach to painting. This is surprising, as her work is so often appended to either the Abstract Expressionist or Beat circles in San Francisco, two groups that prized the qualities of spontaneity and improvisation.

In all, Beside The Rose is a small show with great ambitions. In a limited space, the Whitney has provided a smattering of works in multiple media and of varying sizes, structures, and subjects, yet the exhibition maintains continuity through recurring themes and imagery. And while the works are entirely monochromatic, one does not really feel the lack of color: DeFeo’s range of blacks, whites, and grays is truly masterful. Still, some works seem anomalous in this hanging: one is the collage Applaud the Black Fact; another is, surprisingly, The Rose.

Applaud consists of fragments of women’s nude bodies cut out of magazines, most without faces, and arranged into a vaguely cruciform shape that seems to float against the blank background. In relation to the rest of the works on view, with their large simple forms and dramatic contrasts, the collage appears too literal. Its positioning next to Berman’s photographs of a partially nude DeFeo against the backdrop of an early version of The Rose, however, helps to explain and even support the work’s significance. Alongside Berman’s photos, the collage raises issues of the female versus the male gaze (which prove even more interesting if one is familiar with Conner’s use of pin-up girl images in his work) as well as the question of feminism, something of the elephant in the room: DeFeo disavowed any feminism in her works, but many of them are textbook examples of “central-core” imagery.

Applaud may have been better served if Blossom, a similar work, had also been shown. The Rose too seems a bit without peer, a feeling that might have been alleviated by the inclusion of The Jewel (1959). Painted as the counterpart to The Rose, The Jewel seems an egregious omission, although with its rusts and golds it might have disrupted and even overshadowed the monochromatic nature of the show. Any of DeFeo’s paintings from the mid-1950s would have sufficed to place The Rose in context, for The Rose was the culmination of her then-signature style, an outrageous impasto that created caves, valleys—an entire topography of paint. In this show, the other paintings all have slick, smooth surfaces, a tendency she cultivated during the 1970s. The rough, grainy, earthlike surface of The Rose thus lacks one kind of (rather significant) comparison. Still, the exhibition goes a long way toward presenting the diversity and the consistency of DeFeo’s oeuvre, one that is finally beginning to attract the kind of attention it deserves.