Jay DeFeo, Chiaroscuro

In this new monograph on DeFeo, John Yau looks at the breadth of the artist’s work and her broad range of interests and influences, while the book focuses on her late work, paintings of the 1980s as well as the exceptional corpus of drawings of the 1980s and her photographic oeuvre of the 1970s. It thus complements the book published on the occasion of her Whitney Museum retrospective in 2013. * * Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) was part of a vibrant community of avant-garde artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Edward Kienholz, and Michael McClure. Although best known for her monumental painting “The Rose” (1958–1966), DeFeo worked in a wide range of media and produced an astoundingly diverse and compelling body of work over four decades. DeFeo's unconventional approach to materials and her intensive, physical method make her a unique figure in postwar American art. * * Published with Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.