The brilliant Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is well known for her monumental painting The Rose, described by Lawrence Weschler as a “great billowing fever dream of a masterpiece.” The Rose lay hidden for twenty-five years at the San Francisco Art Institute. Its reemergence in 1995 led to a renaissance of interest in DeFeo’s work, including a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This publication focuses exclusively on Jay DeFeo’s prodigious body of works on paper, executed between 1951 and 1989. The great majority of the 101 images reproduced in this volume are previously unpublished. The book presents, in an intimate format, examples of the artist’s work in a range of media, from tempera and graphite to charcoal and oil. Selections from series including Florence, Tree, Tripod, Water Goggles, Jewelry,Compass, Eraser, Eternal Triangle, Summer Landscape, and Seven Dwarfs demonstrate both the imagination and virtuosity that have made DeFeo’s work legendary.