- Artist or Maker
- Jay DeFeo
United States, New Hampshire, Hanover, 1929-1989 - Title
- The Jewel
- Date Made
- 1959
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 120 × 57 1/2 × 3 in. (304.8 × 146.05 × 7.62 cm)
- Accession Number
- AC1998.47.1
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
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.
- Selected Bibliography
- Ferrell, Elizabeth. About The Rose: Creation and Community in Jay DeFeo's Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
