Monday evening, March 1st, Jason Goldman ’00 presented an in-progress chapter of his dissertation, “Open Secrets: Publicity, Privacy, and Histories of American Art, 1958-69,” to an intimate group in the Olin Arts Center. Goldman is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California, where he studies gender, race and sexuality in modern visual culture and American art.
His dissertation examines suppressed, underground or otherwise non-public artworks that remain at the margins of the discipline. The talk he gave, entitled “Concealed Exposures: Jay DeFeo and The Rose in Public and Private,” explored the work of Jay Defeo, a visual artist associated with the Beat generation in San Francisco.
DeFeo, who lived from 1929 to 1989, worked extensively on drawings, paintings on paper, photographs, collages, photo collages and paintings, often using materials and processes that were regarded at the time as unorthodox or even “low art.” She specifically did this to try to subvert what she called a “hierarchy of material.” Goldman discussed how DeFeo’s most well-known painting, “The Rose,” took nearly eight years to complete and weighs an incredible 2,300 pounds. Goldman showed slides depicting DeFeo’s studio apartment, in which “The Rose” was a near-permanent fixture, shaping the space and being shaped by it.
As implied by the title of the talk, the work was discussed in terms of its odd relationship to the public and the private; it was worked on solely in the intimacy of DeFeo’s home, yet photos of the work were published in several magazines before its completion, resulting in a growing public knowledge and anticipation of the piece before it was ever shown.
The work was curiously heralded a success before it ever left the wall of DeFeo’s apartment, exemplifying the genius of the Beat artists in San Francisco. By the time “The Rose” was publically shown, excitement about it had dwindled so much that it was hung for many years in a conference room, and was not again critically acclaimed until decades later.
Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently declared “The Rose” one of the 111 greatest works of art in the history of Western civilization, saying that it is “perhaps the single most expressive painting of the 1960s, and one of the most expressive statements in the entire last third of the twentieth century.” This immense piece now resides in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, stored flat on the ground because of its heft. Goldman explained how, during the times when it was stored upright or hung for periods of time, the materials of the painting actually slid and shifted at times, resulting in rumors that the work seemed alive.
However, Goldman’s talk focused not only on this seminal work, but also on a series of photos created by DeFeo and fellow artist Wallace Berman. A similar dialectic of the tension between the public and the private runs through these little-known works.
Through a discussion of the series of six photos, which are all posed nudes of DeFeo in progressively more sexually explicit and thematically complex poses with “The Rose” visible or partially visible, Goldman led the audience to question the complicated relationship between the artist and the viewer, and how the nature of a work changes with the way in which it is viewed. Little is known about the photos, but Goldman asserted that they were intended to be shown only to friends of the artists. This did not happen.
Conflict arose when one image from the series was printed in the popular art magazine ArtForum. Goldman discussed how the nude image of DeFeo, which was intended to be a private work, was not only printed and widely distributed, but also credited only to Berman. This event embodied both the public versus private dynamic and the other prominent theme of Goldman’s talk: the gendered politics of the making, viewing and critiquing of art.
Goldman described how, throughout her career, DeFeo worked to escape the label of “woman artist” and simply be evaluated as an artist. Goldman’s best anecdotes about this struggle referred to how critics described her girlish good looks and button nose in evaluating her work, as if her femininity could not be separated from what she created. The audience chuckled and groaned as Goldman read some of the gender-laden “praise” for DeFeo from the 1960s and ’70s. Goldman’s discussion of DeFeo’s work and its reception proved to be a lens through which one can see the intertwining of art, the politics of gender and the relationship between the public and the private spheres.
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