The Brooklyn Rail

In 1953, Jay DeFeo returned to Northern California after a year spent in Europe and North Africa. In a Berkeley studio on Delaware Street, she made a group of nine drawings of trees, characteristic pretexts for formal as well as material experimentation. (In a 1975 interview with the Oakland Museum, DeFeo remarked, “I enjoy the investigation of form, exploring many possibilities of a visual idea. For that reason I often do diptychs or triptychs or sometimes works in a series.”) Nominally connected, each of the “Tree” series makes its subject something specific. One graphite and ink example from 1953 centers on an expanse of paper that summons the wilting tip of an asparagus spear as much as a hyacinth; another from the same year rotates its support horizontally, creating in its torn collage a landscape ground against which a lone mop-topped stick stands in silhouette as a kind of sentry. Still others from across 1953 and 1954 feature thick strokes of tempera, delineating trunk and leaves in various states of resolution and abstraction. Before a field of black, one such trunk projects a branch—a wishbone or phallic protrusion—with a cotton-ball mass at its head, redoubling the larger white cloud of foliage atop the primary shaft.

The Laguna Art Museum owns two of these, prompting an occasion to bring the series back together (absent: one larger, related painting that first hung in Walter Hopps’s so-called Merry-Go-Round show, Action, at the Santa Monica Pier in 1955, and is now lost). Jay DeFeo: Trees is the result, organized by Laguna Art Museum and guest curated by Rochelle Steiner. Beyond the core group of drawings, they have layered in a selection of gelatin silver prints of trees that DeFeo took in the early 1970s when living in Marin County, and gamely and with evident seriousness began working anew with black-and-white photography. The show thus connects work across three decades, and in effect brackets the eight-year period in which DeFeo made The Rose (1958–66), the one-ton, nearly eleven-foot-tall canvas with which she is still identified. If nature broadly construed—nature as already acculturated representation, nature as fantasy or figment—is one throughline, so too does the show make a case for the lingering influence of DeFeo’s travels.

Especially significant to the continuities her travels instantiated seems to have been her time in Florence, where she stayed six months, long enough to set up a studio at the Pensione Bertolini. Using what was at hand (like butcher paper), and necessarily portable, DeFeo likewise absorbed her surroundings as iconography, inclusive of a small wooden crucifix affixed to her bedroom wall in the pensione. In her essay in the accompanying catalogue, Steiner points to a small oil painting from 1952, with a “brown tree-like form with outstretched limbs,” and connects it to crosses DeFeo had visited in churches and cathedrals, as well as to what she made when back in Berkeley. Those trees with their none-too-subtle cruciform shapes do doubly recall ligneous icons and the generative trees of life in medieval glass windows, visual metaphors of vegetation, growth, and rebirth. In what remains a little-remembered episode, poet Michael McClure—who read at the famous and Beat-introducing Six Gallery event in 1955—has recalled a giant adaptation DeFeo entered in the San Francisco Art Annual in this period, where “it created a scandal.… The white cross’s sole decoration was a large splash or splot of tempera. The piece was graffitied by vandals while hanging in the museum. The obscenities that were added worked to make the piece even more profound and consequently more beautiful.”

If the 1950s drawings demonstrate an engagement with historical precedent, archival materials set out alongside them suggest a set of more contemporary associations, by turns ribald and nostalgic. DeFeo kept Christmas trees long after their expiration date, and studio shots here show a dried and shriveled version serving as a forlorn sculpture in the middle of her room—and a surrogate for The Rose when it finally was extracted from the building. (She also apparently used the dead trees as a coat stand or a prop on which to set hats or string lights.) These photographs in the vitrine are arrayed amidst thematically resonant postcards from her copious collection (e.g., a hollowed-out tree from Muir Woods) and photographs of her at work on-site with her own camera; taken together, they fill in gaps between the 1950s and 1970s, and offer visual evidence for how DeFeo shifted from conjuring landscape to observing nature as a different mode of now lens-based investigation.

DeFeo shot around the radically unlike geographies of Marin and Death Valley, among more, in the years to come. The prints chosen for the show range from tightly cropped still-life-like compositions—of bisecting and interleaving fronds; of an electric fan set in a window, an aperture framing the vista behind it—to scenes of trees within their environments, as with one that concentrates on evergreens dusted by snow, clustered on a hillside. Some linger on patterns of bark or replicating geometries of lichen; all are forthrightly touched by light. In this context, the emphasis falls on the content more so than the making, a byproduct of the exhibition coinciding with the museum’s annual Art + Nature initiative that also includes related presentations of work by Fred Tomaselli and Christian Sampson. (Inexplicably, given the initiative’s overwhelming emphasis on ecology, none of this is part of the Getty’s massive PST ART: “Art & Science Collide,” although many a visitor has assumed it is part of that exhibition.) The + does a lot of work and the connection between these terms does, at times in DeFeo’s Trees, appear additive, or analogical. Yet the Trees also pressure this conjunction, as if such terms might already not be just mutually determining, but imbricated.