Despite taking six years of art history courses, attending the same university decades later, reading work by peers in San Francisco’s Beat generation, and having a sister who lived on her former street, I never learned about Jay DeFeo. Then, in 2015 I visited the newly relocated Whitney Museum of American Art. Wandering in and out of its permanent collection galleries, there it was. The Rose stopped me in my tracks. 

Unlike an actual rose, this one is mammoth in size–almost eleven feet tall and weighing just under 2,000 pounds. It is composed of layers and layers of gray oil paint supported by wood and mica, but it looks like a slab of carved and scraped concrete. DeFeo abstracted a rose–a symbol of love, femininity, and beauty–into sharp lines exploding from a central core. That center is light, delicate, exact, and smooth. As the lines push outward, the paint cracks, breaks, and darkens into rubble. It is a vortex that pulls the world down its chutes. It throbs beyond the tightly confined edges of the frame. In both directions, the energy is palpable. It’s the heaviest painting I’ve seen, summoning me deep into a dark and overwhelming pit. It also liberates, throwing its arms out and running free and unfettered—a sunburst of light. How can it contain such extremes?  

The Rose is inextricable from DeFeo herself. In 1958, Wallace Berman photographed her naked with arms outstretched to the edges of the work. Her head is perfectly positioned at its center. Like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, DeFeo has used her body to create perfect symmetry. With this photograph, The Rose reveals itself to be a self-portrait, an indexical relationship of the artist’s body presented to the viewer. Berman’s photograph is one of many taken of the work with and without DeFeo. This work existed beyond its physical form. For its inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 exhibition Sixteen Americans, DeFeo chose not to send the work itself, claiming it was unfinished, but allowed a photograph of it to be printed in the catalog. She did not deny inclusion in the show but allowed it on her own terms. Was a photograph of the work the same thing as the work to her?  

The Rose has a mythic history that surprisingly neither overshadows the work nor impedes its physical presence, as explored in Jane Green and Leah Levy’s 2003 book, Jay DeFeo and The Rose. DeFeo worked on the painting from 1958 to 1966. It went from being called Deathrose to The White Rose (also the title of Bruce Conner’s film capturing its eventual removal from her apartment) to its final title, The Rose. She lived with it in her Fillmore Street apartment, snugly blocking out an entire wall and window. It finally left her apartment when she was evicted and a team of movers cut out the window to lift the work down and out to the street. It traveled once to Los Angeles for exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) before it returned to San Francisco for exhibition at SFMOMA. In 1969, it then was loaned to San Francisco Art Institute where it resided not just in the drab setting of a conference room, but was encased in plaster (part of an unfinished conservation effort) and hidden behind a false wall that displayed student artwork. For two decades, it languished. In 1989, the artist passed away. 

Interest reignited in the 1990’s with a renewed conservation effort and a Whitney curator hoping to include The Rose in an exhibition on the Beat movement. An unheard of effort of funding (over $250,000) and resources was used to restore it, conserve it, and ship it across the country for exhibition and eventual acquisition by the Whitney. 

I have now seen the work over a dozen times. It’s been on view at the Whitney since June 2019, featured in The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965. There is no other work in the entire city I intentionally visit again and again. Museums rotate most collection works on and off view, so one of these days, it will be taken off of display. I imagine it will be a long while before it comes back. Its physicality and frailty (supposedly requiring eight art handlers to install and serious support behind the wall to hold it up) make The Rose complicated to lend out too frequently, and, sadly, DeFeo doesn’t currently garner huge demand. Perhaps I will be proved wrong and an institutional retrospective is somewhere forthcoming.

For now, whenever I get off at that seventh floor, a magnet activates within my chest. My body is gently tugged. If I’m coming from the west, I begin to see the painting through the door frame as I pass through a dark-walled gallery of smaller paintings crawling up and along the wall. I am like a young child: peering around the corner, attention diverted, anticipatory. Norman Lewis, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner all fade away. There I am, The Rose and I.