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Masquerade in Black 1974

Jay DeFeo was a central figure among San Francisco’s beat generation artists in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Inspired by myth, poetry and jazz,  DeFeo is best known for her legendary masterpiece The Rose (1958-1966), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Masquerade in Black is part of a series of work DeFeo created in the 1970’s that used images of mechanical objects painted in a forceful manner to suggest an animate being. This painting was included in a major retrospective of her work in 2012, exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.