Jay Defeo worked on the massive painting, The Rose, for 8 years. When it was removed from her apartment, it basically went into storage for almost 30 years, before being restored and conserved by the Whitney museum.The artist never got to see her most famous piece hanging in a museum like she wanted. This book of essays, and photos, gives a good overview of The Rose’s and Jay Defeo’s place in art history.

Rarely is an artist so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her monumental painting The Rose. Begun in the late 1950s, when DeFeo, a central figure of the Beat generation of San Francisco, was just starting to garner widespread national recognition, the visionary work occupied the artist for eight years. Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum.

It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.This volume is the first major study of The Rose in particular and of Jay DeFeo in general…