DOCSLIB.ORG

The Ring Around the Rose: Jay Defeo and Her Circle

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Ring Around the Rose: Jay Defeo and Her Circle The Ring around The Rose: Jay DeFeo and her Circle By Elizabeth Allison Ferrell A dissertation submitted for partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Emerita Anne M. Wagner, Chair Professor Emeritus Timothy Clark Professor Shannon Jackson Professor Darcy Grigsby Fall 2012 Copyright © Elizabeth Allison Ferrell 2012 All Rights Reserved Abstract The Ring around The Rose by Elizabeth Allison Ferrell Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art University of California, Berkeley Professor Emerita Anne M. Wagner, Chair From 1958 to 1966, the San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo (1929-89) worked on one artwork almost exclusively – a monumental oil-on-canvas painting titled The Rose. The painting’s protracted production isolated DeFeo from the mainstream art world and encouraged contemporaries to cast her as Romanticism’s lonely genius. However, during its creation, The Rose also served as an important matrix for collaboration among artists in DeFeo’s bohemian community. Her neighbors – such as Wallace Berman (1926-76) and Bruce Conner (1933-2008) – appropriated the painting in their works, blurring the boundaries of individual authorship and blending production and reception into a single process of exchange. I argue that these simultaneously creative and social interactions opened up the autonomous artwork, cloistered studio, and the concept of the individualistic artist championed in Cold-War America to negotiate more complex relationships between the individual and the collective. 1 To the memory of my best friend, Mila Noelle Rainof, M.D., whose compassion and courage will always inspire the best things I do i Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………….…iii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………....xi Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………………24 “S.F. Paintings in N.Y. Exhibit”: The legibility of Jay DeFeo’s artistic practice in “Sixteen Americans” Chapter 2……………………………………………………………………………………..….82 “The Individual and his World”: Representing the Fillmore circle to the postwar public Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………………………..…145 Artist’s Model / Model Artist: Wallace Berman’s photographs of Jay DeFeo Chapter 4…………………………………………………………………………………..……202 Myth, Memory and Make-believe: Jay DeFeo’s creative process after and through The Rose Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...261 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………280 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………………290 Timeline of Jay DeFeo’s dealings with The Rose, 1965-74 ii List of Figures Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………10-23 Figure 1: 2322 Fillmore Street, Google Maps, 2011, digital photograph Figure 2: View from the hallway into the kitchen of 2322 Fillmore Street, c. 1955, photograph Figure 3: View of the communal stairwell of 2322 Fillmore Street, Jerry Burchard, 1959, gelatin silver print Figure 4: Wally Hedrick welding in the courtyard of 2322 Fillmore Street, Jerry Burchard, 1959, gelatin silver print Figure 5: Jay DeFeo washing dishes in 2322 Fillmore Street, December 1961, photograph Figure 6: Christmas card to Dorothy Miller, Wally Hedrick, 1959, mimeograph print, glitter, postage stamp and mark, 8 ½ x 11 inches Figure 7: The Rose, Jay DeFeo, 1958-1966, oil with wood and mica on canvas, 10 ¾ x 7 ⅔ x 1 feet Figure 8: Photograph of The Rose, c. 1960 Figure 9: Photograph of The Rose, c. 1963 Figure 10: DeFeo in her studio, c. 1961, photograph Figure 11: Jay DeFeo in the living room of 2322 Fillmore Street, c. 1956, photograph Figure 12: Jay DeFeo in her studio at 2322 Fillmore Street, Jerry Burchard, 1959, gelatin silver print Figure 13: Jay DeFeo’s friends carrying The Rose to its new frame, c. December 1959, photograph Figure 14: Detail of untitled correspondence for Wallace Berman, Jay DeFeo, 1965, mixed media, approx. 16 x 16 inches Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………...…58-81 Figure 1: Reproduction of The Rose in the “Sixteen Americans” catalog, 1959 Figure 2: Jay DeFeo and two unidentified men in the Dilexi Gallery, 1959, gelatin silver print, 7 x 5 inches iii Figure 3: Diagram of Jay DeFeo’s exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, 1959 Figure 4: Works in Jay DeFeo’s exhibition at the Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, 1959 Figure 5: Works in Jay DeFeo’s gallery at “Sixteen Americans,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959-1960 Figure 6: Diagram of Jay DeFeo’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959-1960 Figure 7: Installation view of Jay DeFeo’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans” showing Origin (1956), Death Wish (1958), and Persephone (1957), Soichi Sunami, 1959, photograph, 7 ¼ x 9 ½ inches Figure 8: Installation view of Jay DeFeo’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans” showing Daphne (1958) and The Veronica (1957) with Louise Nevelson’s gallery visible in the background, Soichi Sunami, 1959, photograph, 7 ¼ x 9 ½ inches Figure 9: Installation view of Jim Jarvaise’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans,” Soichi Sunami, 1959, photograph, 7 ¼ x 9 ½ inches Figure 10: Installation view of Frank Stella’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans” with Jim Jarvaise’s works visible in the background, Rudy Bruckhardt, 1959, photograph, 7 ¼ x 9 ½ inches Figure 11: Daphne, Jay DeFeo, 1958, Charcoal, graphite and oil on paper mounted on canvas, 106 x 42 inches Figure 12: Origin, Jay DeFeo, 1956, oil on canvas, 92 x 79 ¾ inches Figure 13: Death Wish, Jay DeFeo, 1958, charcoal, graphite and oil on paper, 89 x 43 ¼ inches Figure 14: The Veronica, Jay DeFeo, 1957, oil on canvas, 132 x 42 ½ inches Figure 15: Persephone, Jay DeFeo, 1957, graphite, charcoal, and oil paint on paper mounted on canvas, 88 x 41 inches Figure 16: Apollo and Daphne, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622-25, marble, 88 x 41 inches Figure 17: Onement I, Barnett Newman, 1948, oil on canvas, 27 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches Figure 18: View of Landscape with Figure (c. 1955), Death Wish (1958), and Daphne (1958) installed in the Dilexi Gallery, 1959, 35mm slide Figure 19: The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Jay DeFeo, 1958, oil, house paint, charcoal, and graphite on paper mounted on two canvases, 129 x 42 ½ inches each iv Figure 20: View of Applaud the Black Fact (1958), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1958), and Bird of Paradise (c. 1957) installed in the Dilexi Gallery, 1959, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches Figure 21: Applaud the Black Fact, Jay DeFeo, 1958, collage on paper mounted on painted canvas, 51 x 36 inches Figure 22: Installation view of Ellsworth Kelly’s gallery in “Sixteen Americans” with Jay DeFeo’s The Veronica (1957) visible in the background, Soichi Sunami, 1959, photograph, 7 ¼ x 9 ½ inches Figure 23: Card sent by Jay DeFeo to Dorothy Miller that includes a piece of The Rose, December 1960 Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………….117-144 Figure 1: Photo-panel of Jeremy Anderson for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 2: Photo-panel of Joe Botherton for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 3: Photo-panel of Bruce Conner for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 4: Photo-panel of Jay DeFeo for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 5: Photo-panel of Helen Dunham for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 6: Photo-panel of Art Grant for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 7: Photo-panel of Wally Hedrick for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 8: Photo-panel of Seymour Locks for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 9: Photo-panel of David Simpson for “The Individual and his World,” Jerry Burchard, 1959, 24 x 20 inches Figure 10: “Art in the Bank,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 1962 v Figure 11: Cover of House and Garden, January 1957 Figure 12: Two installation photographs of “17 Contemporary American Painters” in the United States Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, 1958 Figure 13: Photograph of the “Soviet and U.S. Pavilions at Brussels Fair” reproduced in “All’s Fair,” Time, April 28, 1958, 29 Figure 14: Ad Reinhardt and family at home, Hans Namuth, 1958, photograph Figure 15: Delphine Seyrig, Robert Indiana, Duncan Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Agnes Martin at Coenties Slip, Hans Namuth, 1958, photograph Figure 16: Ellsworth Kelly with Delphine Seyrig and Duncan Youngerman in Kelly’s Coenties Slip studio, Hans Namuth, 1958, photograph Figure 17: Contact sheet of Wally Hedrick and Joan Brown in the courtyard of 2322 Fillmore Street, Jerry Burchard, 1959, 8 x 11 inches Figure 18: Jay DeFeo and Wally Hedrick in their Fillmore Street apartment, Jerry Burchard, 1959, photograph Figures 19-20: Wally Hedrick painting at 2322 Fillmore Street with The Rose in the background, Jerry Burchard, 1959, photograph Figure 21: William Baziotes with neighborhood children in Harlem, New York City, Hans Namuth, 1958, photograph Figure 22: Two portraits of Jay DeFeo, Jerry Burchard, 1959, photographs Figure 23: Richard Diebenkorn with his dog in Berkeley, California, Hans Namuth, 1958, photograph Figure 24: Barnett Newman, New York City, Hans Namuth, 1951, photograph Figure 25: Opening spread of Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art News, May 1951, 38-39, photographs by Hans Namuth Figure 26: Franz Kline standing infront of Crow Dancer,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Wallace Berman Aleph
    “Art is Love is God”: Wallace Berman and the Transmission of Aleph, 1956-66 by Chelsea Ryanne Behle B.A. Art History, Emphasis in Public Art and Architecture University of San Diego, 2006 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 2012 ©2012 Chelsea Ryanne Behle. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author: __________________________________________________ Department of Architecture May 24, 2012 Certified by: __________________________________________________________ Caroline Jones, PhD Professor of the History of Art Thesis Supervisor Accepted by:__________________________________________________________ Takehiko Nagakura Associate Professor of Design and Computation Chair of the Department Committee on Graduate Students Thesis Supervisor: Caroline Jones, PhD Title: Professor of the History of Art Thesis Reader 1: Kristel Smentek, PhD Title: Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of the History of Art Thesis Reader 2: Rebecca Sheehan, PhD Title: College Fellow in Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University 2 “Art is Love is God”: Wallace Berman and the Transmission of Aleph, 1956-66 by Chelsea Ryanne Behle Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 24, 2012 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Architecture Studies ABSTRACT In 1956 in Los Angeles, California, Wallace Berman, a Beat assemblage artist, poet and founder of Semina magazine, began to make a film.
    [Show full text]
  • Revising the Yellowstone Injunction to Fit New York's Commercial
    Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law Volume 14 Issue 1 Article 7 12-27-2019 “Fair Enough”? Revising the Yellowstone Injunction to Fit New York’s Commercial Leasing Landscape and Promote Judicial Economy Gabriel W. Block Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/bjcfcl Part of the Bankruptcy Law Commons, Business Organizations Law Commons, Litigation Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons, and the State and Local Government Law Commons Recommended Citation Gabriel W. Block, “Fair Enough”? Revising the Yellowstone Injunction to Fit New York’s Commercial Leasing Landscape and Promote Judicial Economy, 14 Brook. J. Corp. Fin. & Com. L. (). Available at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/bjcfcl/vol14/iss1/7 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law by an authorized editor of BrooklynWorks. FAIR ENOU REIIN TE YELLOWSTONE INJUNCTION TO FIT NEW YORK COMMERCIAL LEAIN LANCAPE AN PROMOTE JUICIAL ECONOMY ABTRACT The Yellowstone injunction is an equitable remedy that tolls any applicable cure period and gives tenants a better opportunity to maintain their leasehold when they have defaulted under their lease. The remedy is available to commercial tenants in New York City and to commercial and residential tenants throughout the State. This Note examines the Yellowstone injunction in the context of New York City’s commercial tenants, who employ it most frequently and benefit most from its protections. This Note examines the development and application of the Yellowstone injunction and proposes changing the doctrine to exclude cases of monetary defaults and expired or nonexistent cure periods from the realm of Yellowstone relief.
    [Show full text]
  • Lava Thomas [email protected] B
    Lava Thomas www.lavathomas.com [email protected] b. Los Angeles, CA Selected Solo Exhibitions 2018 Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2015 Looking Back and Seeing Now, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA 2014 Lava Thomas: Beyond, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA Selected Group Exhibitions 2020 New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA The Black Index, Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, New York City, NY UNTITLED, ART, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2019 UNTITLED, ART, Rena Bransten Gallery, Miami, FL To Reflect Us, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA Adjust Yo’ Eyes For This Darkness, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Oakland, CA The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC Women to Watch 2020 Nominee, Surfacing Histories, Sculpting Memories, Hubble Galleries, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press, Las Cruces Museum of Art, NM Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press, Gallery 360, Northeastern University, Boston, MA Spring Auction Exhibition, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA 2018 PULSE Miami Beach, Rena Bransten Gallery, Miami, FL My Silences Had Not Protected Me, For Freedoms and Fort Gansevoort, New York, NY EXPO Chicago, Rena Bransten Gallery, Chicago, IL Pretty Big Things, Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Personal to Political: Celebrating the African American Artists of Paulson Fontaine Press, Krasl Art Center, St.
    [Show full text]
  • JAY DEFEO May 1 – June 7, 2014
    JAY DEFEO May 1 – June 7, 2014 NEW YORK, April 09, 2014 – Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Jay DeFeo’s work in New York since the acclaimed Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013. Assembling fifty key works spanning the years 1965–1989, the exhibit examines DeFeo’s distinctive exploration of visual vocabulary, rich materiality and experimental process across the media of painting, drawing, photography and rarely seen photocopy works. DeFeo’s diverse and constantly evolving practice extended far beyond her seminal work The Rose (1958–66). Throughout her career, DeFeo consistently blurred the boundaries between abstraction and representation, transcending the identity of the common objects that fascinated her. Moving seamlessly between painting, drawing and collage, DeFeo introduced photography into her oeuvre in 1970. In the mid-1970s, the artist began using the photocopy machine as a new type of photographic lens through which she created series of works that defy an accepted understanding of the limitations of the photocopier. As seen in large-scale works such as Tuxedo Junction (1965/1974), surface and texture are of paramount importance in her oeuvre, partly inspired by the crumbling facades found in Paris and Florence, where she traveled early in her career. The densely layered surface of built-up oil paint in Tuxedo Junction is echoed decades later in the wrinkles of tissues pressed against the glass plate of the photocopier as DeFeo investigates texture in two and three dimensions. This exhibition focuses on a handful of forms and objects that appear and reappear in her work: a torn fragment of a 1958 work titled White Spica, her camera tripod, a hybrid item created from an antique candlestick telephone, flowers, a generic tissue box, or a tiny ceramic cup.
    [Show full text]
  • Bruce Conner (1933 – 2008)
    BRUCE CONNER (1933 – 2008) BORN: McPherson, Kansas EDUCATION: 1956 B.F.A., Nebraska University 1956 Brooklyn Museum Art School 1957 University of Colorado SOLO EXHIBITIONS: 2012 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Bruce Conner and the Primal Scene of Punk Rock, MCA Denver, Denver, CO 2011 Bruce Conner: An Anonymous Memorial, American University, Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C. Bruce Conner: Falling Leaves: An Anonymous Memorial, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY 2010 Bruce Conner: 1970’s, Kunstalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (travelled to Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland) I am Not Bruce Conner, Ursula Blickle Foundation, Krachtal, Germany Bruce Conner, Inova/Kenilworth Institute, University of Wisonsin, Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts 4 ½, Creative Time, New York, NY Long Play: Bruce Conner and the Singles Collection, SFMOMA, San Francisco The Late Bruce Conner, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY 2009 Bruce Conner: Discovered, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Bruce Conner in the 1970s, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Intelligent Design: Untitled Lithographs 1970-1971, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI 2008 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Applause, Miyake Fine Art, Tokyo, Japan Mabuhay Gardens, UC Berkeley Art Musuem, Berkeley, CA 2007 Bruce Conner, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2006 Bruce Conner Sheldon Memorial art Gallery, Lincoln, NE 2005 After Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse and Emily Feather, Katzen Art Center Museum, American
    [Show full text]
  • Helen Pashgianhelen Helen Pashgian L Acm a Delmonico • Prestel
    HELEN HELEN PASHGIAN ELIEL HELEN PASHGIAN LACMA DELMONICO • PRESTEL HELEN CAROL S. ELIEL PASHGIAN 9 This exhibition was organized by the Published in conjunction with the exhibition Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Funding at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California is provided by the Director’s Circle, with additional support from Suzanne Deal Booth (March 30–June 29, 2014). and David G. Booth. EXHIBITION ITINERARY Published by the Los Angeles County All rights reserved. No part of this book may Museum of Art be reproduced or transmitted in any form Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Boulevard or by any means, electronic or mechanical, March 30–June 29, 2014 Los Angeles, California 90036 including photocopy, recording, or any other (323) 857-6000 information storage and retrieval system, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville www.lacma.org or otherwise without written permission from September 26, 2014–January 4, 2015 the publishers. Head of Publications: Lisa Gabrielle Mark Editor: Jennifer MacNair Stitt ISBN 978-3-7913-5385-2 Rights and Reproductions: Dawson Weber Creative Director: Lorraine Wild Designer: Xiaoqing Wang FRONT COVER, BACK COVER, Proofreader: Jane Hyun PAGES 3–6, 10, AND 11 Untitled, 2012–13, details and installation view Formed acrylic 1 Color Separator, Printer, and Binder: 12 parts, each approx. 96 17 ⁄2 20 inches PR1MARY COLOR In Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2014 This book is typeset in Locator. PAGE 9 Helen Pashgian at work, Pasadena, 1970 Copyright ¦ 2014 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Printed and bound in Los Angeles, California Published in 2014 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art In association with DelMonico Books • Prestel Prestel, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH Prestel Verlag Neumarkter Strasse 28 81673 Munich Germany Tel.: +49 (0)89 41 36 0 Fax: +49 (0)89 41 36 23 35 Prestel Publishing Ltd.
    [Show full text]
  • Oral History Interview with Hans Namuth, 1971 Aug. 12-Sept. 14
    Oral history interview with Hans Namuth, 1971 Aug. 12-Sept. 14 Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Hans Namuth on August 12 and September 8, 1971. The interview took place in New York City, and was conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview PAUL CUMMINGS: It's August 12, 1971 - Paul Cummings talking to Hans Namuth in his studio in New York City. You were born in Germany - right? HANS NAMUTH: Right. PAUL CUMMINGS: Could you tell me something about life there and growing up and education and how you got started? You were born in - what? - 1915? HANS NAMUTH: Yes. I grew up during the war years and inflation. I have memories of the French Occupation and shooting in the streets. The French occupied Essen. We had a French deserter living with us who taught me my first French. I went to the equivalent of a gymnasium, Humboldt Oberrealschule in Essen, hating school, loathing school. I would say it was a prison. Eventually I started to work in a bookshop in Essen at the age of seventeen and became very affiliated with Leftist groups in 1932 when everything was brewing and for a moment we didn't know whether they were going to go all the way Left or all the way Right. I think the Communist and the Socialist Parties at the time lost a big chance of gaining power in Germany by not uniting in 1931-1932.
    [Show full text]
  • DILEXI GALLERY Multi-Venue Retrospective
    DILEXI GALLERY Multi-Venue Retrospective Taking place at: Brian Gross Fine Art / San Francisco Crown Point Press / San Francisco Parker Gallery / Los Angeles Parrasch Heijnen Gallery / Los Angeles The Landing / Los Angeles with a related exhibition at: Marc Selwyn Fine Art / Los Angeles The Dilexi Multi-Venue Retrospective The Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco operated in the years and Southern Californian artists that had begun with his 1958-1969 and played a key role in the cultivation and friendship and tight relationship with well-known curator development of contemporary art in the Bay Area and Walter Hopps and the Ferus Gallery. beyond. The Dilexi’s young director Jim Newman had an implicit understanding of works that engaged paradigmatic Following the closure of its San Francisco venue, the Dilexi shifts, embraced new philosophical constructs, and served went on to become the Dilexi Foundation commissioning as vessels of sacred reverie for a new era. artist films, happenings, publications, and performances which sought to continue its objectives within a broader Dilexi presented artists who not only became some of the cultural sphere. most well-known in California and American art, but also notably distinguished itself by showcasing disparate artists This multi-venue exhibition, taking place in the summer of as a cohesive like-minded whole. It functioned much like 2019 at five galleries in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, a laboratory with variant chemical compounds that when rekindles the Dilexi’s original spirit of alliance. This staging combined offered a powerful philosophical formula that of multiple museum quality shows allows an exploration of actively transmuted the cultural landscape, allowing its the deeper philosophic underpinnings of the gallery’s role artists to find passage through the confining culture of the as a key vehicle in showcasing the breadth of ideas taking status quo toward a total liberation and mystical revolution.
    [Show full text]
  • PRESS RELEASE for Immediate Release
    THE MAYOR GALLERY 21 Cork Street, First Floor, London W1S 3LZ T +44 (0) 20 7734 3558 F +44 (0) 20 7494 1377 www.mayorgallery.com PRESS RELEASE For immediate release ROBERT MALLARY Reliefs and Sculptures 1957-1965 st st 1 November – 1 December 2017 Untitled Amerigo, 1958, resin mix and pigment on board, 177 x 119 x 10 cm The work of Robert Mallary (b. 1917 Ohio, USA – d. 1997 Massachusetts, USA) is characterised by a consistent commitment to technological innovation, and to the exploration of materiality. As well as pioneering the use of computers to design sculptures in the late 1960s, during the first part of his career Mallary produced grungy assemblage sculptures and expressionist paintings, which merged the nihilism of continental existentialist thinking with the irreverence of Neo-Dada. The dissonance between these areas of experimentation perhaps partly explains Mallary’s current place on the margins of post-war art histories. Yet his early practice of the 1950s and 1960s intersects with a number of significant processes and issues explored by painters and sculptors in the decades after World War II, across America and Europe. Mallary spent his childhood in California, before studying in Mexico City during the late 1930s and early 1940s with David Alfaro Siqueiros, an experience that shaped his interest in unorthodox materials and techniques. The influence of Siqueiros and other muralists such as José Clemente Orozco can be detected in the series of relief works that Mallary made in the mid-late 1950s, while teaching at the University of New Mexico. Their experimental mode of production, use of alternative materials and visceral facticity align the artist with other European and American painters working in this decade such as Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Cy Twombly, Jay DeFeo and Hassel Smith.
    [Show full text]
  • The Prints of Bruce Conner
    Press Release Afterimage: The Prints of Bruce Conner September 20 – November 17, 2012 Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, in collaboration with the Conner Family Trust, is pleased to present Afterimage: The Prints of Bruce Conner, the first exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery. Conner, who passed away in 2008, was born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933 and moved to San Francisco in the late 1950s where he became a pivotal figure in the Beat scene of poets, writers, artists and performers. Active in all media, including painting, collage and assemblage, sculpture, graphic arts, filmmaking, and photography, Conner brought a radical and iconoclastic approach to art-making, questioning and rejecting ideals of artistic purity, style, and identity, as well as the market-driven dynamic of the art world. The show, accompanied by an on-line catalogue with an essay by Peter Boswell, will include lithographs Conner produced in 1970-71 to preserve the imagery of his ephemeral felt-tip drawings of the period, as well as later prints based on ink blot drawings and collages. Linking the artist’s extensive graphic oeuvre to his work in other media is a command of light and shadow that permeates images hovering between fugitive and eternal, fantasy and reality. The retinal effect of his starkly monochromatic drawings of the 1960s and 1970s is achieved through the use of densely woven lines, creating highly complex shifting patterns. Formally rigorous, these maze- like drawings negate external references and dissolve figure/ground boundaries. Often structured by circular mandala forms, they attest to the artist’s deep knowledge of occult and Eastern philosophies.
    [Show full text]
  • Allan Sekula
    Allan Sekula Polonia and Other Fables The Renaissance Society September 20 – December 13, 2009 at The University of Chicago 5 T a C P 8 t h h h 1 o i e T c 1 n h a R S e g The e : o e o ( u U n 7 , t a 7 n I h l l 3 i i i s E n v ) s 7 o l Renaissance e l i 0 a i r s s 2 s n A 6 - i c t 8 v 0 e y 6 e 6 7 n 3 S Society o 0 u 7 f o e c C i h Mòwimy po Polsku at The University of Chicago e i t c 5811 South Ellis Avenue y a 4th floor g o In 1950, Hans Namuth documented Jackson variety of photographic tropes ranging from means of thinking through rather than excluding Nothing could be further from the pit’s Chicago, IL 60637 Pollock in what are now iconic photographs. clandestine snapshots to formal portraiture, from the self, beginning with the most basic social testosterone-fueled mania than Sekula’s portrait unit, the family. Autobiography recurs in varying of an extremely slight female trader. She stands, Museum Hours One features a pensive Pollock crouched serial to aerial photography, and from street Tuesday - Friday: 10am - 5pm amongst abraded weeds in front of a weathered photography to ethnography in the vein of degrees of subtlety throughout his work. It is arms at her side, in front of a confetti-strewn Saturday, Sunday: 12- 5pm Model T Ford.
    [Show full text]
  • The Whitney to Present Jay Defeo: a Retrospective
    THE WHITNEY TO PRESENT JAY DEFEO: A RETROSPECTIVE DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph by Burt Glinn. © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos NEW YORK, December 12, 2012—Jay DeFeo spent nearly eight years realizing her masterpiece, The Rose (1958-66), an approximately 2,000-pound painting that is now recognized as one of the icons of the Whitney Museum’s collection. This winter, the Whitney will place The Rose within the context of more than four decades of DeFeo’s work in the most comprehensive look at the artist to date. Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, which opens on February 28, 2013, features nearly 150 of DeFeo’s works, many of which will be exhibited for the first time. The show traces motifs and themes the artist examined throughout her career in drawings, photographs, collages, jewelry, and the monumental paintings for which she is best known. The exhibition is organized by Dana Miller, curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney, and will be on view in the fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries through June 2, 2013. “DeFeo remains an artist whose full career has not yet received the careful consideration that it deserves,” Miller states. “In presenting her entire career, this retrospective demonstrates the captivating sweep of DeFeo’s heterogeneous work and illuminates her groundbreaking experimentation and extraordinary vision.” The retrospective comes home to the Whitney after receiving critical acclaim and attracting large audiences at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote in his review of the exhibition, “Before and since her death at 60 in 1989, DeFeo's reputation has hinged on one colossal work: ‘The Rose’…This belated career survey corrects that overemphasis but, more important, it introduces DeFeo to a broad public as an artist of wide and diverse accomplishment.” The substantially larger presentation at the Whitney will also feature an expanded selection of DeFeo’s drawings and photographs from the 1970s.
    [Show full text]