PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED and emotionally bereft, the beat generation artist Jay DeFeo left San Francisco in 1965 and sought refuge in Marin County to recover from the eight intense years she devoted to creating her masterpiece, "The Rose," a massive, 2,300-pound painting that is the centerpiece of a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

SF MOMA is exhibiting 130 of her pieces through Feb. 3, the first time her complete range of work is being shown in public.

DeFeo, who died of cancer in 1989 at the age of 60, is described in the museum's text for the show as "one of the most important and innovative artists of her generation, but one who, until now, has not been given her due."

That feeling of being overlooked and under-appreciated runs through the recollections of those who knew her during the 16 years she lived in Marin, first in a friend's cottage in Ross and then a larger Victorian in Larkspur's Baltimore Canyon.

"She never could understand why she didn't get the attention that the other artists of her generation did," said Judi Brady of Novato, who took classes from DeFeo and wrote her master's thesis on "The Rose." "That ate at her."

Beginning 'The Rose'


In the 1950s, DeFeo was well known among the artists, poets, writers and jazz musicians who made San Francisco famous as the capital of the beat generation. In 1959, she was included in the star-making exhibition "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York along with such now celebrated artists as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenberg. For whatever reason, perhaps because she didn't want to go without her husband, artist Wally Hedrick, DeFeo didn't attend the Manhattan opening of the historic show, a decision she bitterly regretted.

"It was a big deal, but Wally didn't want to go, and so they didn't go to the opening, which is too bad," Brady remembered. "That always bothered her, that she missed this chance to become more than a local semi-famous artist. She craved that kind of attention."

By then, she had begun work on "The Rose," which she described as "a marriage between painting and sculpture." It would become the work that defined her career.

Roughly 11 feet high and 8 feet wide, it filled the bay window of the 2322 Fillmore St. apartment she shared with Hedrick, who had mentored a young Jerry Garcia when the future Grateful Dead paterfamilias studied with him at the San Francisco Art Institute. At one time, Hedrick also taught in Marin at Indian Valley College.

Working on "The Rose," DeFeo used a mason's trowel and palette knife to apply a mountain of paint that she chiseled and shaped into a pattern of sharply grooved segments radiating from a point near the center of the immense canvas.

Existing on not much more than brandy and cigarettes, she labored on it for eight years, to the exclusion of almost everything and anyone else in her life.

"She became totally obsessed with it," artist friend Bruce Conner once said.

When their landlord quadrupled their rent, she and Hedrick, who were in the throes of breaking up their marriage, were forced to move out of their upstairs apartment. And that meant moving a painting that weighed more than a ton. "The Rose" was so large and ungainly that a team of movers had to cut away two feet of the apartment's bay window and use a forklift to get it into a moving van.

Conner shot a film of that legendary day, titled "The White Rose," a cult documentary short that is being screened at the SF MOMA retrospective.

With the loss of her marriage, her home and her life's work, DeFeo was so depressed that she lay down on the painting before if was taken away as if it were her bier. It was called "The Death Rose" then (she would later remove "death," thinking it sounded morbid), and the Bay Area artist grapevine was buzzing with rumors that after she finished it, her purpose for living would be gone. Conner said that day marked "the end of Jay." That turned out to be overheated art world romanticism. But it was true that it was the end of one phase of her life and the beginning of another.

The Marin years

Larkspur artist Kendall King met DeFeo in 1967, the Summer of Love, when he took a painting class she was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Because DeFeo didn't drive, he would pick her up at the Ross cottage where she was staying and give her a lift to class, becoming her friend and confidante along the way.

"She was coming down from just finishing 'The Rose' and wasn't up for doing much of anything else," he remembered. "She was stalled as a painter. It took her awhile to get out of that."

In that era of counter-culture personal freedom, DeFeo had no compunction about trading painting for partying.

"She always said that was her second adolescence," recalled Ursula Cipa, an artist who was then a self-described Marinwood housewife, soon to be divorced, who got to know DeFeo when she took a feminist art class from her at Sonoma State. After DeFeo's death, Cipa would become an executor of her estate.

"Not working in the studio for those years was an issue for a lot of people, but Jay never said she regretted it," she recalled. "She just enjoyed herself."

After she moved to Larkspur, DeFeo befriended rock singer Janis Joplin, who bought a house near hers. Kendall King remembered her welcoming the hard-living, hard-drinking singer to the neighborhood.

"Jay told me that she brought her a cake as a welcoming gift," he recalled. "But she was so startled, so starstruck when Janis opened the door, that she dropped the cake on the doorstep."

The beatnik artist and the hippie rock star made quite a pair, a melding of two major personalities from rebellious generations. King described them as "two high-powered women who were well known in their own spheres." According to Judi Brady, their favorite party house was a yellow Victorian in Novato that is now the chamber of commerce and visitors bureau. Joplin was living in the Larkspur house when she died of a drug overdose in a Los Angeles hotel room in 1970 at the age of 27.

An artist in need of a second act

In a 1969 article in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner headlined "Lady in Search of An Encore," writer Gerald Adams described the then 40-year-old DeFeo as a "beautiful brunette" with "a cute uplifted nose" and eyes with "a perky sparkle."

Judi Brady remembers her more as an "iron butterfly."

"She had this little wispy Jackie Kennedy voice and she was sweet to me, but she could also be like steel," she said. "And she always had a little bit of insecurity. It wasn't so much humility but more of being unsure of herself."

After her self-imposed hiatus from painting, DeFeo converted her Larkspur sun porch into a studio and began working again, this time with acrylics rather than oil paints.

In creating "The Rose," she'd piled on a ton of white lead oil paint, a toxic substance she blamed for the gum disease that caused her to lose most of her teeth.

"When I was working in her studio, she had these 5-gallon cans of it left over from 'The Rose' that she gave to me," Kendall King recalled. "But that stuff was so toxic I didn't want to fool with it."

The first paintings DeFeo did in Larkspur were two large pieces inspired by her dental work and false teeth. Titled "Crescent Bridge I and II," they are part of the San Francisco retrospective.

DeFeo left Marin in 1981 when she took her first full-time teaching position at Mills College in Oakland.

At that time, the San Francisco Art Institute reluctantly granted "The Rose" what was to be a temporary home. Falling apart, it was bolted to a wall in a conference room, where people reportedly spilled coffee and stubbed cigarettes on it. It was eventually entombed behind a wall and stayed hidden there for two decades, until the Whitney Museum and DeFeo's estate raised the money to buy and repair it in the 1990s.

Sadly, the artist didn't live to see her life's work given the respect and recognition that it's being accorded in the San Francisco retrospective, a homecoming for one of the city's most monumental works of art.

After climbing Mount Kenya in Africa, achieving a lifelong dream of scaling a major peak, DeFeo was diagnosed with lung cancer. As she was slowly dying of the disease, the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged her home and studio in Oakland, forcing her to move once again. She was in a hospice program when she died on Nov. 11, 1989.

"I talked to her the day before she died," Judi Brady remembered. "She said, 'I love you.' That is something so special to me."

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if you go

What: Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective
When: Through Feb. 3
Tickets: $18 adults, $13 seniors, $11 students
Information: 357-4000,