The Jewel

© The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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The Jewel

United States, 1959
Paintings
Oil on canvas
120 × 57 1/2 × 3 in. (304.8 × 146.05 × 7.62 cm)
Gift of the 1998 Collectors Committee (AC1998.47.1)
Modern Art
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Since gallery displays may change often, please contact us before you visit to make certain this item is on view.

Label

Jay DeFeo was a visionary artist allied with the San Francisco Bay Area painters, musicians, and poets of the Beat Generation....
Jay DeFeo was a visionary artist allied with the San Francisco Bay Area painters, musicians, and poets of the Beat Generation. Her work combines geometric forms with the textural density of Abstract Expressionism. The Jewel, which evokes celestial, religious, or bodily associations, is one of two major canvases DeFeo began in 1958. The second work, The Rose, eventually weighed nearly a ton; as DeFeo continued to add paint to its surface over the course of eight years, it became a symbol of her ambitious use of materials and commitment to transcendent abstract imagery. Like The Rose, The Jewel depicts rays emanating from a central point and is composed of paint so thick that the canvas begins to resemble a sculpture.

Wall label, 2021.
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Bibliography

  • Jay DeFeo: Selected Works, Past and Present: Adaline Kent Award Exhibition. San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1984.
  • Ferrell, Elizabeth. About The Rose: Creation and Community in Jay DeFeo's Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
  • Jay DeFeo: Selected Works, Past and Present: Adaline Kent Award Exhibition. San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1984.
  • Ferrell, Elizabeth. About The Rose: Creation and Community in Jay DeFeo's Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

  • Barron, Stephanie, S. Bernstein and I. S. Fort, with essays by Stephanie Barron, Sherri Bernstein, M. Dear, Howard N. Fox and Richard Rodriguez.  Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Berkeley:  University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.

    View this publication in LACMA's Reading Room

  • Green, Jane and Leah Levy, eds.  Jay DeFeo and The Rose.  Berkeley:  University of California Press and New York:  Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

  • Williams, Thomas.  The Bay Area School: California Artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2013.

     

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