Jay DeFeo’s Dialectics of Painting

This technical-art historical study sets out to clarify central questions about the relationship of US-American artist Jay DeFeo (1929–89) to materiality, in particular the role media choices played in the development of her visual vocabulary. To that end, the essay traces distinct stages of DeFeo’s experimentation and maturation through a wide array of documents, many of which have, to date, gone unpublished: color charts, photographs of works in progress and studio contents, interviews, lectures, letters, and journals. We discuss the insights yielded by these archival sources alongside results of scientific analysis of fifty-eight samples from paintings representative of her entire oeuvre.