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The Roses of Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner: Belated Thoughts on Intermediality and Friendship

Les roses de Jay DeFeo et Bruce Conner : pensées rétrospectives sur l’intermedialité et l’amitié
Susan Felleman

Résumés

Le court métrage The White Rose réalisée par Bruce Conner (1967) est une œuvre qui appartient à un lieu et une date déterminés – Fillmore Street, San Francisco, un jour de 1965 – mais c’est aussi un document sur l’amitié de Conner avec l’artiste Jay DeFeo, peintre de The Rose, et sur la peinture monumentale à laquelle DeFeo travailla pendant huit ans, et qui dut être retirée de son appartement par une équipe professionnelle lorsqu’elle fut contrainte d’abandonner sa résidence et son atelier. L’intermédialité joue un rôle central dans l’œuvre de Bruce Conner, reflétant son parcours d’artiste visuel qu’il a intégré dans son travail de cinéaste dès A Movie en 1958. Ce court métrage poignant réalisé des années plus tard sur son amie et son œuvre est peut-être le plus écrit de ses films, mais c’est un film aussi profondément intermédial, en ce que la capture d’images est faite caméra à l’épaule simulant le geste du pinceau manié par le peintre et aussi parce que ce très court film présente, en quelques minutes, les espaces irrévocables, les textures, les activités, et les pertes de ce jour où The Rose a quitté sa demeure.

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1“No painting in the modern era seems to approach Jay DeFeo’s masterpiece The Rose in sheer scale and weight, length of physical evolution or justifiable mythologizing,” wrote Marla Prather in 2003, of a painting that was legendary long before it was completed and forgotten not long after (Green and Levy ix). Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) worked on the monumental painting from 1958 to 1966.1 This article has been about as long in the making, although my investment of time has been far from continuous; the scale and ambition of my labor never so monumental as that of DeFeo’s masterwork!2 I have long been interested in both DeFeo’s painting and Conner’s film, which I encountered around the same time, in the late 1990s: the painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the film, first on a VHS collection of Conner’s films, and not long after on a 16mm print. I return to these works and the friendship that connects them, not because I can contribute much to the literature on Conner or DeFeo, but to think through some questions about intermediality, and the material, social, and emotional conditions within and around a work, an oeuvre, and between oeuvres, that pertain to it. Roses are gifts of love. DeFeo’s painting was initially titled The Death Rose; for a time, it was The White Rose; and finally, simply The Rose, each change corresponding to transformations in the work over time (DeFeo and Conner 233). Conner’s film preserved the second title, perhaps conveying through word and image the connotations that make the white rose a symbol of innocence, purity, or friendship, as opposed to the more familiar aura of romantic love and passion associated with the red rose. Or perhaps the meaning of the rose is irrelevant to the story of art, devotion, friendship, and love that emerges in the intermedial embrace of Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner (1933-2008), and their works.

2DeFeo’s The Rose—almost eleven by seven-and-a-half feet and eleven inches deep (327.3 × 234.3 × 27.9 cm), made of oil on canvas, with wood and mica—weighed over 2000 pounds (907 kg) and had to be laboriously detached from the wall that had supported it when it was removed on November 9, 1965, from DeFeo’s San Francisco studio by means of an architectural episiotomy; two feet (61 cm) of window sill was cut away so the crated painting could be lowered to the street (Sherrill 30). The process of the painting’s extraction, crating and removal by Bekins movers in white coveralls was documented by DeFeo’s friend Bruce Conner, who over the next two years edited the footage shot on Fillmore Street over two days into the lyrical seven-minute film, The White Rose (1967). The film’s full title was originally The White Rose: Jay DeFeo’s Painting Removed by Angelic Hosts. In it, DeFeo is an alternately elusive, forlorn and impish presence.

Figure 1. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Figure 1. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

3The big painting and the little film were first seen together at the Pasadena Art Museum in early 1969. By the time it had been moved to San Francisco for a second appearance, DeFeo’s magnum opus was already in an incipient state of self-destruction, cracking and crumbling under its own weight and incrustations. In 1974 the San Francisco Art Institute undertook the first stage of an elaborate conservation plan for The Rose, which involved—among other measures—encasing the surface in plaster, but by the end of the year, the painting had not found a permanent home and conservation efforts ceased. In 1979, the Art Institute built a particleboard wall over DeFeo’s half-buried masterpiece, to make room for the exhibition of student work. Ten years later, Jay DeFeo died; The Rose was still hidden from view, in limbo. There is more to this story, including the painting’s ultimate acquisition and restoration by the Whitney Museum, but the saga of The Rose, from inception to resurrection, is an improbably mythic one, entangled with gender and mediation (see Sherrill), and with Bruce Conner, who, with DeFeo, held a wake for The Rose on May 21, 1973, and devoted considerable time and energy in subsequent years to the fruitless effort to find a home for the interred colossus (Ferrell, About the Rose 155-60, 178).

Jay DeFeo

4Jay DeFeo was one of the central figures of the San Francisco avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. She had studied art at the University of California Berkeley, where she distinguished herself sufficiently to be awarded the Sigmund Martin Heller Traveling Fellowship in Art, with which she spent October 1951 to January 1953 in Europe, with extended stays in Paris, London, and Florence, as well as shorter visits with friends to provincial France, the Pyrenees, Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. In Florence, she was inspired, and extraordinarily prolific, creating more than 200 works in three months, and applied successfully to extend her stay there by another three. The impact of Italian art of the Renaissance and Baroque on DeFeo’s work was immeasurable. Her productivity during the Florentine sojourn might appear to contrast with the many years dedicated to just one painting but, by all accounts, The Rose was effectively made and unmade many hundreds of times.

5Upon returning from Europe, DeFeo experimented with media for a time, working in sculpture, drawing, photography, collage, and even jewelry—mainly but not entirely for income—as well as painting. She met and married fellow artist Wally Hedrick, and they were involved in forming and running the cooperative Six Gallery, which became one of the centers of the burgeoning underground and contemporary art scenes in the coming years (it was there, in October 1955, that Kenneth Rexroth emceed a poetry night, at which Allen Ginsberg performed the first public reading of Howl). That same year DeFeo and Hedrick moved to 2322 Fillmore Street—where The Rose was conceived and created—a flat with large, high-ceilinged spaces sufficient for them to live and work, although DeFeo’s studio had no power, was unheated and unilluminated, except for the light from the tall windows. Their neighbors in the building and nearby in the years they lived on Fillmore included many other members of the San Francisco art and beat scenes, including, after their moves to the city with their wives in 1957, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner, both of whom were very close to DeFeo in the years of her obsessive work on The Rose and would become major chroniclers of it. The Fillmore building was one of the centers of social activity for the San Francisco underground. As Dana Miller recounts :

The whole of the San Francisco art world, in those days no more than several hundred people, could fit into the apartments and their back courtyard, and the frequent parties held there were legendary, with beer Hedrick brewed in the bathtub and music by the Studio 13 Jass Band. Starting in the late 1950s DeFeo would spend the entire month of December decorating the apartment and Christmas tree for the couple’s annual holiday party; the dead trees were kept long after the holidays, and they accumulated year after year. (Miller et al 20)

These dead trees—sad artifacts of joyous times—are supporting players in Conner’s film. And DeFeo’s eccentric wrapping of gifts, which were suspended from the ceiling at Christmas, inspired the assemblages of some of her fellow artists, including Conner, according to him (Berkson 52).

6Apart from Christmas, DeFeo’s work in the few years leading up to The Rose, grew in scale, ambition, and recognition. The major works of 1956-1957 all relate to her European sojourn and the deep impression her experiences and Renaissance art had made on her. Origin, a fairly monumental work of 1956, marks a significant turn in DeFeo’s practice. Working intensively with a palette knife, she experimented with repetitive, additive forms. The at-first-glance monochromatic work harbors trails and traces of color from the edge of the palette knife. The imbricated forms of Origin lead to the radial forms, abstracted from nature, characteristic of many of the works of the coming years, including The Rose. Apparition, 1956, a large drawing based on one of Leonardo’s flower studies, inaugurates this formal theme. In several works of 1957—including the paintings Song of Innocence, The Verónica, and The Annunciation—a dynamic flow of facture seems to erupt from a single seam or cavity. The combination of intensely material, almost sculptural passages of paint and explosive composition—simultaneously organic and abstract (although often with a Christian allusion)—anticipates the monumental project of The Rose.

7Of The Eyes, the bizarre, gigantic drawing DeFeo completed in 1958, a drawing of eyes superimposed upon the marks of a perspectivally receding, abstract architecture, Dana Miller writes:

“[…] The Eyes was the aperture through which DeFeo said she was able to envision those works, specifically, The Rose. What would DeFeo see if she were to look through those eyes, which were after all her own—that is, if she were to ‘live in’ her work? (Miller et al 24).”

  • 3 Jay DeFeo, Lecture at Mills College, December 2, 1986, quoted in Miller et al (29).

The idea of enlarging a small thing through an almost mystical process of seeing through surrogate, god-like eyes and of coming to live in the work, and in a sense dying there, is central to the mythic aura around the monumental, endless project of the next eight years, for the painter herself—what Russian formalist Boris Tomasevski would call her “autobiographical legend”— and the painting. DeFeo worked most days, so long as there was daylight, building up paint with a mason’s trowel and palette knife, and then chiseling much of it away. She would scrape the paint off the tools onto her stool, the floor, and the surrounding walls, then harvest, remix, and reuse it, in a sense spreading the work around, a spatial, environmental element of the process that would become another focus of Conner’s film. DeFeo described the long process of doing, undoing, and reworking the painting as “a metamorphosis almost like art history from very primitive to very classical, to geometric and then finally very baroque, and then I pulled it back to really quite classical.”3

Figure 2. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Figure 2. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

8After about a year of work, she consented to pose with her work in progress for her friend Wallace Berman, who took a series of photographs of DeFeo with what was then called the Deathrose (see Ferrell, “Artist’s Model” 32-36). In many of these images, the artist was partially or fully unclothed; a few include graphic genital detail. Berman perhaps intended to draw a comparison between the common yonic form and mystique of DeFeo’s painting and the female genital. In some images, he placed the artist’s full body in formal relation to the painting. In one, the pose echoes the composition of the painting, with her head placed at the central focal point, her arms and legs spread-eagled, suggesting at the same time a figure emerging from the radiating, explosive composition and a magnificent halo or emanation from DeFeo’s head. As Miller observes of this pose, although it has clear parallels to Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the composition depends even more on a cruciform structure and the “proportions of Christ’s body on the Cross.” (Miller et al 26). Interestingly, Berman elaborated the photograph with a collaged Hebrew Tzaddi, placed over DeFeo’s chest, creating a syncretic and no doubt exceedingly sacrilegious image that simultaneously connotes a Christian sacrifice and a Kabbalistic superhero.

  • 4 Whitney Museum of American Art, “Audio guide stop for Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958–66 — Level 2” http (...)

9Berman’s are only some of the many photographs made in these years of DeFeo and her magnum opus. These photographic documents (by Jerry Burchard, Marty Sacco, Bert Glinn, and unknown photographers) of the painting in situ generally capture a couple of the salient attributes of the epic saga of The Rose: 1) the much remarked upon experiential property of the painting’s raked illumination from the sides (it blocked the entire bay window and was therefore lit exclusively by daylight from the tall windows on either side), which highlighted its sculptural qualities and depth; and, when DeFeo is shown with the painting, 2) the striking incongruity of the diminutive artist before the titanic structure. Occasionally, as with one photo from the painting’s so-called “Baroque,” stage, the camera’s capacity to create an indexical trace of passing time gave form to the way that the artist’s days, weeks, months, and years disappeared into the painting, as DeFeo herself could be said to have; no doubt the result of a long exposure, she is but an indistinct blur in the foreground. These salient attributes, I would argue, are not at all unrelated. The identification of artist and work becomes near complete; one can easily imagine a body beneath the volcanic, suppurating surface of The Rose. In a 1988 interview with Sidra Stich, DeFeo herself recalled that it was only, “when the painting was removed that I was able to see—it does have a profile sort of like a pregnant woman!”4

10“The Rose was not only a visionary presence,” Sandra Phillips observes, “but a concrete daily one in the life of the artist and of her friends. It was almost part of DeFeo’s body, a physical extension of herself. At one point in the process, she reputedly dropped her own pearls onto the surface, where they were gradually engulfed by the pigment” (Phillips 66-67). This material merging of artist and artwork reflects the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on bodily engagement and process, the scale and dynamism of the painterly field an artifact of the artist’s active, but inevitably past presence. It also relates to contemporary multimedia practices such as Rauschenberg’s Combines, and the assemblages of DeFeo’s friend Bruce Conner. Indeed, although he is now best known for his underground classic A Movie (1958) and his other films, these were for Conner generally a secondary part of his practice—and only since Conner’s death in 2008 has his larger body of work received the attention it has long deserved (see Hatch; Frieling and Garrels). Much of his work of the period during which DeFeo worked on her giant canvas shares characteristics with hers.

Bruce Conner

11In multimedia constructions like Arachne (1959), Conner worked on a large scale that suggested the human body and mixed materials in ways that defied medium specificity. “Encountering the assemblage in person is a disconcerting experience,” as Kevin Hatch notes (Hatch 56). It gives the viewer an odd visual sensation of infinitely receding space […]” The nylon stockings that are stretched across the top of the work, creating a complex, variegated surface, are, as Hatch notes, “like and unlike painting—recalling, for example, the skeins of paint covering an abstract expressionist canvas. The stretches of nylon work as surface gestures but they also conceal and dissimulate the surface” (Hatch 59). Among the objects that are discernible here and there beneath this dissimulated surface is a strand of imitation pearls (one wonders if the pearls that are said to have disappeared into DeFeo’s painting were somehow magically caught in his web, or whether this was a concerted point of identification). Another discernable object is a doll’s head. One might well exclaim, as does Porbus in the dénouement of Balzac’s Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unfinished Masterpiece), “there’s a woman under there!”

12Indeed, for one familiar with this climactic passage from Balzac’s novella, it is difficult to contemplate Conner’s work—even more so DeFeo’s—without being reminded of its vividly overdetermined image of artistic obsession’s outcome and embodiment. Balzac’s ending finds two historical painters, Porbus and the young Poussin, confounded before the supposed masterpiece—a painting of a legendarily beautiful woman—upon which the fictional Frenhofer has been laboring for many years:

“The old fraud’s pulling our leg,” Poussin murmured, returning to face the so-called painting. “All I see are colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.”
“We must be missing something,” Porbus insisted.
Coming closer, they discerned, in one corner of the canvas, the tip of a bare foot emerging from the chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist; but a delightful foot, a living foot! They stood stock-still with admiration before this fragment which had escaped from an incredible, slow, and advancing destruction. That foot appeared there like the torso of some Parian marble Venus rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes.
“There’s a woman under there!” Porbus cried […] (Balzac 40-41)

  • 5 Elizabeth Ferrell (About the Rose, 68) also briefly references Balzac’s novel as a paradigm of the (...)

13Balzac’s personification of obsession and the image of its manifestation as a woman buried in a wall of paint exquisitely illustrate gendered ideas about artistic production and iconography and were emblematic for modern artists (most famously Cézanne and Picasso) and for modern critics who saw Frenhofer’s mass of lines as an uncanny premonition of abstract painting, Abstract Expressionism particularly. Its interrogation of the theme of genius bordering on madness has been put on film at least twice, in loose adaptations by Sidney Peterson (a California contemporary of DeFeo and Conner’s) in 1949 and Jacques Rivette in 1991. I do not think Conner’s White Rose is exactly another adaptation but seen in relation to the body of work that Conner was making as DeFeo was making The Rose, a poignant, rather morbid sense of bodily incorporation and disappearance emerges.5

14Another work of Conner’s from this period, one with Dickensian and Duchampian intertexts, The Bride (1960) is quite literal in its sense of bodily incorporation. It was one of a series of more figural assemblages that, along with other multimedia works, Conner showed at his successful inaugural exhibition at San Francisco’s Batman Gallery, on Fillmore Street, near the DeFeo-Hedrick flat, in November 1960. Another somewhat different secretion of bodies into large scale work in this period is seen in a piece that Conner worked on obsessively—albeit not exclusively—for many of the same years that his friend Jay was working on hers, his Untitled (1954-1961), a collage measuring over five by four feet (160 x 124 cm.). According to Kevin Hatch:

Completed in 1954, the “front” of the collage won first prize in the San Francisco Art Association’s annual exhibition in 1958 and served as Conner’s entrée into the San Francisco art world. On the other hand, the collage on the piece’s “underbelly,” as Conner called it, emerged slowly, with additions beginning in 1954 but ending only in the early 1960s. (Hatch 79).

15“According to Conner, the papers pasted to the back of the work began as a parody of the seals and stamps conferring art world legitimacy that he had seen on the backs of paintings in museum collections.” But this parody obviously became something else in the years that Conner continued to amass “a visual cacophony: photographs of seminude women, screenshots from B movies, photographs of disasters, newspaper clippings, reproductions of Old Master paintings, Conner’s draft card, an ‘Ez for Prez” sticker…, and text fragments stating ‘FRAGILE’ and ‘WARNING: YOU are in great danger’[…]” (Hatch 75) The “underbelly” collage incorporates the artist, his pet obsessions and secrets in a project more profane but no less ambitious, really, than DeFeo’s. While DeFeo’s disappearance into her work suggests a more mystical incorporation, Conner’s is perhaps more psychological (in a socio-political, as well as personal sense): the underbelly is hidden in plain sight; the hidden face of the work is the return of the repressed.

16The material merging of artist and work, thus, in addition to embodying an enduring modernist myth, can be both mystical and psychological. Conner’s The White Rose, a small, jazzy, seemingly improvisational, and singularly elegiac film, offers about one minute of film for every hour the Bekins men spent removing The Rose, one for every year DeFeo worked on the painting. The film never shows painting and painter in the same frame. She only appears when the work has been laid in its crate and covered, so the film effects a subtle but almost magical substitution. The wistful little figure appears to be the spirit of The Rose. At one point, DeFeo is shown lying down upon the half-crated now shrouded painting, as if in a bed, or upon a tomb, and certainly when the “angelic hosts” later lower it to the street, load it into the truck, and drive away, there’s a funereal poignancy.

17The music that enhances this poignancy is from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, recorded in late 1959 and early 1960 (so contemporaneous with DeFeo and Conner’s works). This well-known recording features an extended improvisation on Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the bittersweet theme of which, according to the composer’s widow, “was both an evocation of the happy days of their honeymoon and a response to Rodrigo's devastation at the miscarriage of their first pregnancy,”6 a subtext that is especially poignant in relation to the ecstatic forms of DeFeo’s masterpiece, her identification with the work, her observation about its pregnant profile, and the course of its facture and reception. Indeed, she later spoke of having “nursed” along the image in The Rose, lest it be “stillborn” (Ferrell, About the Rose 112). In 1959, a year into its progress, Dorothy Miller visited the DeFeo-Hedrick studio and selected works by both to be included in the upcoming Sixteen Americans exhibition which opened at the Museum of Modern Art later that year. In the two subsequent years, as a result of her inclusion in this major exhibition, as well as others, DeFeo’s reputation soared, her studio was frequently visited, and the massive undertaking received noteworthy national press. But by 1965, when Hedrick and DeFeo, whose marriage was ending, learned they would have to vacate their flat, The Rose, which had been an object of much interest for prospective acquisition, still unfinished, had failed to find a buyer and was, perhaps, beginning to be seen by some as a folly. Conner’s White Rose thus evokes both the auspicious days gone by, loss, and uncertainty.

18In an interview, Conner claimed that his film was partly inspired by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc (Miller et al 31), and although the influence is not obvious, certainly there is a sacral aura to The White Rose. As Rebecca Solnit observes of the moment in the film when the movers begin to remove the painting, “it blocks out more and more light, until the men become silhouettes and only a halo of light surrounds it, like the sun in eclipse. It descends like Christ from the cross” (Solnit 79). Greil Marcus continues this analogy, describing the treatment of the body once it has been laid down. “It’s wrapped up as if in a shroud, for burial.” (Marcus 65) Conner himself recalled the entire studio space in similarly bodily terms, “the floor—because this paint didn’t dry—had a skin,” he said. “It would dry on the surface—but she was taking out lumps an inch thick […] it was like walking over flesh” (quoted in Marcus 65).

19Parallel to the Christian allusions conjured by Conner’s film, with its “accumulation of cuts, of part images […] [a] pileup of images [that] creates a sense of no-time, of time suspended,” (Marcus 65) are allusions to birth. The white-clad Bekins men can be seen as angels, as pall bearers, or—with their obvious discipline, tools, and training—as a medical team. The separation of the painting from the flesh-like surfaces of the studio, the cutting of the sill to extend the window for the big painting to be delivered, its careful handling, swaddling and removal all contribute to this other reading, which is not an alternative one but one that coexists with the sacred and funereal. Perhaps at the end of the film, DeFeo seems, as Greil Marcus implies, like a bereft mother, yet she also looks like a forlorn child. This beautiful, allusive film is inconclusive, albeit conclusively sad. By the time it was first seen, and The Rose first exhibited, in 1969—even by the time it was completed in 1967—the exceptional place and time, in the lives of DeFeo, Conner, and their milieu, captured on the verge of passing, were past.

Figure 3. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967, 16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Figure 3. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967, 16mm, black/white, sound, 7min

Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Intermediality and friendship

20Elizabeth Ferrell has written of DeFeo’s The Rose as “a nexus for artistic collaboration” in this milieu: the distinctly insular, experimental, and convivial Fillmore artist community (Ferrell, About the Rose 4). Ferrell’s book begins with a couple of photographs, one a damaged snapshot from a “remounting party” DeFeo held in the winter of 1959-60, at which a bunch of her friends enjoyed themselves while helping her transfer the massive painting to a larger canvas. Contrasting the San Francisco scene to the dominant one in New York, Ferrell asks,

Where does The Rose fit within foundational discursive binaries—such as high modernism/postmodernism, individual authorship/collective labor, autonomy/heteronomy, medium specificity/intermedia, opticality/objecthood, expression/appropriation, and closed work/open text—that have historically structured dominant narratives of art made in the United States during the decades following World War II?

  • 7 Hatch 173, note 84: Bruce Conner, “The Rose: Eulogy as well as a proposal that the ROSE be seen in (...)

21And she answers, “The Rose, its making, and its consumption variously transcended, evaded, and collapsed such dichotomies,” unfolding this claim in a series of studies of the painting’s engagement by artists friends of DeFeo’s, including Conner (Ferrell, About the Rose 3). The particular binary around medium specificity and intermediality has long concerned me, as an art historian trained in a formalist tradition and a film scholar focused on relationships between cinema and the other visual arts. Thus, I am drawn to this film and the scene it documents. Neither artist’s work adopts a modernist paradigm of medium specificity, although Conner’s The White Rose is exquisitely cinematic and DeFeo’s painting, if one judges by sheer paint(erliness), is the painting to end all paintings. Intermediality is a term that refers to several related phenomena—individual works that employ multiple media, that incorporate or refer to other media, and relationships among and between works in various media, in theory and praxis (see Pethő; Knowles and Schmid). These are all phenomena of Jay DeFeo’s epic, years-long production (ultimately a combination of painting, sculpture, and environment), Bruce Conner’s oeuvre overall (assemblages, collage films), and the poignant film he made of his friend and her work, perhaps his most narrative, capturing with a handheld camera as gestural as a paint stroke, in a few minutes, the poignancy of the day The Rose left home and, moreover, the years of his friend’s and his community’s devotion to the work he called “the basic reference point from which it was possible to gauge everything else.”7

22To appreciate the intermediality of Bruce Conner’s film work, compare the way that The White Rose expresses Conner’s feeling for her praxis and for Jay DeFeo herself, at a moment of loss and separation, to the way his friendship with pop singer and dancer Toni Basil manifests in the exuberant and graphic Breakaway (1966), which he made in the period between shooting and completing The White Rose. The differences are reflected in the music— the high-spirited, rebellious “Breakaway” and the moody and mournful “Sketches of Spain”—but also along expressly intermedial lines. From beginning to end, Basil cuts a graphically pop, initially two-dimensional, and very frontal, performative figure against black. When the camera starts to move, it effectively dances with her, as Johanna Gosse, who describes Breakaway as a collaborative ciné-dance, observes: “Conner deploys dizzying camera zooms, stroboscopic effects, and rapid-fire cuts that transform Basil’s choreography into a psychedelic spectacle of pulsating, blurred, ecstatic movement” (Gosse 2-3).

23The White Rose, like Breakaway, and nearly all of Conner’s films, includes dazzling clusters of very short shots, admixed unpredictably with longer ones. But while the accumulation of shots in Breakaway—which intensify to suddenly slow-motion shots of Basil floating nude across the screen and are then seen (and heard) in the film’s second half in reverse—creates an almost psychedelic pop head-trip, The White Rose is more ruminative, employing a cinematic vocabulary akin to painting and assemblage—stroke for stroke, accretion for accretion. Exploring in quick, often circling glimpses the residue of the now nearly deserted home and studio, the film captures—or rather constructs—accretion itself, in fleeting views of a dark corner forest of dead Christmas trees, of piles of empty paint cans, and the space of and around DeFeo’s painting: the rather sculptural surface of The Rose’s radiating shafts of facture, masses of paint layering the floor and the stool the artist used to reach the heights of the canvas, and the very physical process of the team of men who have arrived to extract and remove the work from the environment that has grown from and around it over the years. As mentioned above, the film is almost half over, and The Rose lying half-crated on the floor, when the artist herself is finally glimpsed. This is no pas de deux, no ciné-dance. It’s a portrait of a space, its surfaces, an almost mystical artwork, and the work of taking it down and out. Jay DeFeo is an obscure protagonist. She has not been part of the account of the arrival and the extraction; she is first espied outside the studio on a fire escape, swinging her feet like a child, looking down at the street where a lift is being prepared to receive the painting. Shots of DeFeo continue to appear only intermittently, somewhat more frequently toward the end, when the painting has left. Finally, when she’s seen in a series of concluding shots, taken from a range of angles, sitting in the window that was cut away to remove the painting, looking out, ruefully smoking a cigarette, she remains inaccessible; her gaze meets that of the camera just once, just briefly.

24Yet, the relationship between DeFeo and Conner was an intimate one. In the post-Fillmore years, even as they lived farther apart, they became closer, spending so much time on the telephone that this device became one of DeFeo’s nicknames for her friend. Each made, and often mailed, works—assemblages and collages—dedicated to and in relation to the other and they strategized about how to recover The Rose from limbo. Ferrell characterizes theirs and other collaborations among artists in the Fillmore Street community as “interindividual,” observing the precarious balance between autonomy and interchange, rather than joint production, that prevailed (Ferrell, About the Rose 22-26). Intimacy, interindividuality, intermediality: these are fluid, correlated, personal, social, and material conditions around Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner in the Fillmore days but also perhaps the conditions of other artist friendships and communities, even some of those which have tended to be framed by the more familiar “modernist medium specificity, market-driven styles, and competitive environment” of post-war New York (Ferrell, About the Rose 17). Because where there is love between artists, particularly those working in different or multiple media, intermediality is a likely outcome.

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Bibliographie

Works Cited

BALZAC, Honoré de. The Unknown Masterpiece (Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu). Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: New York Review Books, 2001.

BERKSON, Bill. “Without the Rose: DeFeo in Sixteen Americans.” Jay DeFeo and the Rose. Eds. Jane Green and Leah Levy. 42-54.

DEFEO, Jay and Bruce CONNER. “A Conversation.” Grand Street 13.4 (1995): 223-234. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=lfh&AN=9505041832&site=ehost-live.

FERRELL, Elizabeth. “Artist’s Model/Model Artist: Wallace Berman’s Photographs of Jay DeFeo.” Art History 40.5 (nov. 2017): 1072-1097.

FERRELL, Elizabeth. About the Rose: Creation and Community in Jay Defeo’s Circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

FRIELING, Rudolf, and Gary GARRELS, eds. Bruce Conner: It's All True. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2016.

GOSSE, Johanna. “Pop, Collaboration, Utopia: Bruce Conner’s BREAKAWAY in 1960s Los Angeles.” Camera Obscura 89 (Fall 2015): 1-27.

GREEN, Jane and Leah LEVY, eds. Jay DeFeo and The Rose. Berkeley: University of California Press / New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

HATCH, Kevin. Looking for Bruce Conner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

KNOWLES, Kim and Marion SCHMID, eds. Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

MARCUS, Greil. “Ritual in Transfigured Time,” Film Comment 41.1 (jan.-feb. 2005): 62-66.

MILLER, Dana, et. al. Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

PETHŐ, Ágnes. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-between. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

PHILLIPS, Sandra S. “Photographing the Rose.” Jay DeFeo and the Rose. Eds. Jane Green and Leah Levy. 65-67.

SHERRILL, Martha. “The Story of the Rose.” Jay DeFeo and the Rose. Eds. Jane Green and Leah Levy. 29-37.

SOLNIT, Rebecca. Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990.

TOMASHEVKY, Boris. “Literature and Biography.” Eds. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Readings in Russian Poetics. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971. 47-55.

Art Works Cited

BERMAN, Wallace. Jay DeFeo, 1958. Gelatin silver print with transfer type mounted on board. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

BERMAN, Wallace. Multiple photographs of Jay DeFeo, 1959. About the Rose. By Elizabeth Ferrell. Yale University Press, 2022.

BURCHARD, Jerry. Jay DeFeo standing in front of Deathrose at 2322 Fillmore Street, 1959. Photograph. About the Rose. By Elizabeth Ferrell. Yale University Press, 2022.

CONNER, Bruce. Arachne, 1959. Mixed media: nylon stockings, collage, cardboard. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

CONNER, Bruce, dir. Breakaway, 1966. 16mm film.

CONNER, Bruce. The Bride, 1960. Mixed media: wood, nylon, string, wax, paint, candles, costume jewelry, marbles, paper doily, etc. The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

CONNER, Bruce, dir. A Movie, 1958. 16mm film.

CONNER, Bruce. Untitled, 1954-1961. Mixed media: paper, wood, adhesive, nails, paint, staples, metal, tar, feathers, plastic, etc. on Masonite. The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

CONNER, Bruce, dir. The White Rose, 1967. 16mm film.

DAVIS, Miles. Sketches of Spain, 1960. Columbia Records.

DEFEO, Jay. The Annunciation, 1957-1959. Oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago.

DEFEO, Jay. Apparition, 1956. Charcoal and chalk on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DEFEO, Jay. The Eyes, 1958. Graphite pencil on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DEFEO, Jay. Origin, 1956. Oil on canvas. University of California Berkeley Art Museum.

DEFEO, Jay. The Rose, 1958-1966. Oil on canvas with wood and mica. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DEFEO, Jay. Song of Innocence, 1957. Oil on canvas. The Jay DeFeo Foundation.

DEFEO, Jay. The Verónica, 1957. Oil on canvas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

DREYER, Carl Theodor, dir. The Passion of Joan of Arc [La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc], 1928. Société Générale des Films.

GLINN, Burt. Jay DeFeo working on The Rose, 1960. Photograph. Jay DeFeo and The Rose. Edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy, University of California Press / Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

LEONARDO DA VINCI. Study of the proportions of the human body, known as the Vitruvian Man, ca. 1492. Metalpoint, pen and ink, touches of watercolor on white paper. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venezia.

PETERSON, Sidney, dir. Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur, 1949. 16mm film.

RIVETTE, Jacques, dir. La belle noiseuse, 1991. Pierre Grise Distribution.

RODRIGO, Joaquín. Concierto de Aranjuez, 1939.

SACCO, Marty. Jay DeFeo and The Rose, 1961. Photograph. Jay DeFeo and The Rose. Edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy, University of California Press / Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. Jay DeFeo working in 2322 Fillmore Street with The Rose in by window, ca. 1960-61. Photograph. Jay DeFeo and The Rose. Edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy, University of California Press / Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER. The Rose, late “baroque” phase, with blurred figure and stool. Photograph. Jay DeFeo and The Rose. Edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy, University of California Press / Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.

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Notes

1 For images of The Rose and other works by DeFeo, see https://www.jaydefeofoundation.org/artwork..

2 The article originated as a talk at the symposium, “Art & Cinema,” at KASKcinema, Ghent, Belgium, December 7, 2013—at which was screened a print of Bruce Conner’s film, The White Rose—and has more or less languished since then, even as the literature on both Conner and DeFeo has grown and a number of major exhibitions have been mounted.

3 Jay DeFeo, Lecture at Mills College, December 2, 1986, quoted in Miller et al (29).

4 Whitney Museum of American Art, “Audio guide stop for Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958–66 — Level 2” http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen?play_id=810. Accessed 1 December 2013 (no longer to be found).

5 Elizabeth Ferrell (About the Rose, 68) also briefly references Balzac’s novel as a paradigm of the romantic myth of the modern artist and the aura of obsession and loss that surrounded DeFeo’s masterpiece.

6 Wikipedia entry on Rodrigo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaqu%C3%ADn_Rodrigo. Accessed 25 July 2022.

7 Hatch 173, note 84: Bruce Conner, “The Rose: Eulogy as well as a proposal that the ROSE be seen in a different light,” unpublished manuscript (2004), Bruce Conner Archival Material.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min
Crédits Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/6087/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 374k
Titre Figure 2. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min
Crédits Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/6087/img-2.JPG
Fichier image/jpeg, 413k
Titre Figure 3. Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967, 16mm, black/white, sound, 7min
Crédits Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/docannexe/image/6087/img-3.JPG
Fichier image/jpeg, 336k
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Référence électronique

Susan Felleman, « The Roses of Jay DeFeo and Bruce Conner: Belated Thoughts on Intermediality and Friendship »Interfaces [En ligne], 48 | 2022, mis en ligne le 21 décembre 2022, consulté le 13 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/6087 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.6087

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Auteur

Susan Felleman

University of South Carolina

Susan Felleman is Professor of Art History and Film and Media Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of numerous articles, essays, and book chapters, the books Botticelli in Hollywood: The Films of Albert Lewin (Twayne 1997), Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2006), Real Objects in Unreal Situations: Modern Art in Fiction Films (Intellect 2014), and Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), co-authored with Steven Jacobs, Vito Adriaenssens and Lisa Colpaert. Her first video essay, “Four Ways to Be a Woman Artist… According to the Movies,” created with Hannah Shikle, appears in [in]Transition 9.2 (2022).

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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