Oral history interview with Jay DeFeo, 1975 June 3-1976 January 23 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. 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 Jay De Feo on June 3, 1975, July 18, 1975, and January 23, 1976. The interview took place in Larkspur, California, and was conducted by Paul J. Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. This is a rough transcription that may include typographical errors. Interview PK: What I'd like to do today in our conversation is lay in some biographical information about your background and your personal experiences. One of the outstanding experiences of your life, of course, was all the time and effort devoted to The Rose, your major painting. But I thought what we could do today is save The Rose for a second interview and really talk about Jay and the events leading up to that very important experience. So what I'd like to ask first of all is for you to give some biographical information, especially as it might tie in with your later career as an artist. Obviously, when you were only a couple of years old you can't remember anything that was art-oriented. JDF: Oh, yes. PK: Oh, you can? Well, that's good. Well, you were born in Hanover, right? JDF: Yes. PK: Hanover, New Hampshire in 1929, the year of the Crash. And I see that you moved to the San Francisco area in 1931. Where do you want to start? JDF: Okay. Just a factual background, then. When I was born, my father was going to medical school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I lived there, I guess, for about 3 years. And I still have memories of that period, the place where we lived, the landscape and what have you. PK: Have you ever been back since? JDF: No, I haven't. I was back East briefly on my way to Europe after I'd graduated from the University of California, but never to New Hampshire. PK: But basically you really are, except for those first few years, a Californian. JDF: I'm a Westerner, right. [Laughs] Or even a Middle Westerner, because I did spend a lot of my childhood in Colorado, too. PK: Oh, I didn't know that. After your family moved to . JDF: If you really want things that I recall, I was a first child born to a student of Dartmouth. Eleazar Wheelock (sic), Ernest Martin Hopkins, as I recall, was the president of the school at the time. That name has always been a kind of outstanding one in my memory. I was presented with a perambulator on that occasion. Supposedly, it was quite an event, considering what has gone on at college campuses since. Anyway, we lived there for the first three years, and I do have personal memories of living with my parents there. Then we moved back to California, and my father continued to go to school. He went both to the University of California as well as Stanford. It was kind of a difficult time, especially because of the Depression. My grandmother had three sons, and no one could really find work at that time. My mother was one of the main sources of support. She was doing a great deal towards sending my father through school. PK: Were your grandparents, or at least one set of grandparents, here in California? JDF: Yes. And my mother's parents lived in Colorado. My parents didn't get along and kind of broke up when I was at an early age. Partly because of a personality conflict and also because of other difficulties. PK: Maybe the pressures of medical school? JDF: The pressures of the time, that was a good part of it. And I don't want to go into all the personal differences between mother and her mother-in-law. A good part of my childhood was spent living with members of the family other than my actual parents. And I lived with my grandmother a great deal in California. PK: That was in San Francisco? JDF: Yes. And also I lived with my mother's parents in Colorado during the summertime. PK: So those were the schizophrenic days, the city Jay and the country Jay. JDF: Right. And, well, I think possibly I made a kind of a joke out of that. I suppose it did have an influence on me. Everything does. PK: How do you think it did? You say you joke about a sort of schizophrenia. JDF: Well I did. [Laughs] PK: Two personalities? JDF: Well, you said when we were having lunch together that Wally commented on me being a funky girl. That might have been my Colorado bringing-up. PK: All those pigs and horses. JDF: I think also later I was influenced by the two kinds of painting which I'm interested in, or which I consciously or unconsciously tried to resolve in my own work. PK: What are they? JDF: A kind of a classic style, if you wish, for lack of a better word. I don't want to think of it as a sophisticated style necessarily. But something that's classic in nature, influenced by the Renaissance. PK: More formal? JDF: Formal, right. I'm not happy unless I've got that. But at the same time something that is essentially either funky or primitive. Putting it another way, a very close relationship to the use of the materials and my relationship to the process of painting. But that's progressing way into the future. Let's try to stick to this little bit. PK: Good! I'm supposed to tell you that. [Laughs] Well, let me ask one other thing about your early years growing up. I gather then that you weren't with either one of your parents most of the time. JDF: Part of the situation there was one of health. I kind of fell heir to a whole bunch of childhood diseases, simultaneously, which put me in a very weakened condition. And my mother, who was also going through a terrible strain with her relationship to the family and whatever, became ill, too. Now, I was put into Stanford Rest Home for about a year. PK: How old were you then? JDF: I was still pre-school. How-how PK: About four? JDF: Yes. Five maybe. And that was a partial isolation from the family. My mother fell ill, too. As a result of that, after I got out of the rest home, they wanted me to be separated from her. You know, there might be some kind of contagious effect. In fact, I was put in for that reason, too, because they thought for a while that my mother might be tubercular, which turned out not to be the case. But we were separated for that reason for quite a while. And my mother was sent back to Colorado which was considered to be a better climate for her condition. After she came back, and I finally got out of the rest home, there were other circumstances in the family that caused my father and mother to split up. Consequently I lived a good deal with my grandmother, and with my grandparents in Colorado. After my father finally graduated from medical school (which I can still remember-I think it was from Stanford). We are still in the Depression years, or post-Depression years. He worked at-I think it was called the 3C Camps. That stands for Civil Service if I'm not mistaken. I don't know exactly. But it was a program that Roosevelt instigated to stimulate the economy. PK: And employ the unemployed. JDF: Right, right. Anyway, he became a physician that traveled around with the worker groups in these camps. Consequently we lived in may places in Northern California. My mother and I more or less camped in a kind of small town close to the camp where he was in residence. He was separated from us a good deal of the time. And, due to his job during the early years in the 30's, we lived in a number of small places in Northern California: Alturas, Dunsmuir, Cedarsville, Red Bluff, to name a few. Many of them. PK: Obviously your parents were still together at that time? JDF: Ah, yes and no. As I say, they never got along. I don't know if it was impossible for them to be together, or if it was just a question of convenience. Daddy could never be home. But, at any rate, somewhere along the line my father fell very much in love with another woman and was living with her. He was living two kinds of existences simultaneously. It was a long time before I ever found about this. Even my mother found out about it. Eventually she discovered that things were being charged on the family account. Things like baby clothes and so forth and so on, which she had absolutely no knowledge of. And my father isn't, I guess, a very careful person in some ways.