- 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
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Copyright
- © The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
