The Rose, the
monumental work that the Whitney Museum helped save and now owns,
almost literally illustrates DeFeo's transformative process. For
the first seven years of her work on it (1958-65), the painting
occupied a bay window area in her apartment, with its back toward
the main windows and light streaming in from the side windows. At
first it was called Deathrose ("Death Throes",
as Lucy Lippard noticed, "Death Rows," or "Death Rays"),
with a burst of rays focused off-center like The Eyes. The painting at that point
had an asymmetrical focal point into which everything vanished. But gradually,
as DeFeo chipped away at it and added to it, the painting took on life, was centered
on an even larger canvas, and ultimately became The Rose, nurtured by the light
coming through the windows at its back and sides and the artist at its front.
In his brilliant essay for the book that accompanies the show (Jay DeFeo
and The Rose, Jane Green and Leah Levy, eds., University of California
Press, 2003), Richard Cándida Smith writes, "She aimed for a revelation of the
emergence of order, establishing its inescapable mystery by placing the source
of the emergence in a physically impossible space on the other side of the canvas." The
painting, in all its changes and thicknesses, is between two places, the
universe outside the window and the one inside Jay DeFeo.
— Donald Goddard,
2004
