Jay DeFeo, 60; Abstract Painter

Jay DeFeo, one of the breakthrough artists from Los Angeles’ storied Ferus Gallery, the seminal group that helped establish California art as an international force, has died in Oakland.

Her curator, Leah Levy, said Tuesday that the abstract expressionist was 60 when she died in Oakland Saturday of lung cancer.

Most recently she had been on the faculty of Mills College in Oakland where a memorial for her will be held next Tuesday.

The old Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard where Miss DeFeo established her reputation was a haven in the 1950s for modernists, first in Los Angeles and then the Bay Area; it was an era that has come to be looked on as the first significant emergence of local painters.

Many of her early works, such as “Origin” in 1956 and “The Veronica” in 1957, now are housed in such places as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the permanent collection of UC Berkeley.

Others were included in the “Sixteen Americans” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959.

In 1964 she displayed a 5-by-10-foot abstract called “The Rose” at the old Pasadena Museum that was painted but, recalled Times art critic William Wilson, “had so much paint on it it looked carved.”

It weighed 2,300 pounds and required professional movers and a crane to get it from her studio to the museum.

Miss Levy said “The Rose” is about to undergo restoration and will be exhibited on completion.

Miss DeFeo attended UC Berkeley where she earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, later receiving an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1982.

In 1985, after an absence from the Los Angeles art scene, she returned with an exhibit of 17 large abstracts. Wilson wrote that “these are paintings that remember that painting is about form existing in space mantled with light. . . . (The) paintings have lives of their own and their maker is privileged to manipulate the grammar of nature in the service of art. . . .”

“Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper/1951-1989,” a major retrospective of her drawings, photo collages and paintings on paper, is scheduled to open at the UC Berkeley art museum Jan. 9.

She is survived by her father, Dr. Henry D. DeFeo, her stepmother, Dorothy, a brother and two sisters.

Before her death she had established a Jay DeFeo Graduate Fellowship at Mills College and contributions are asked to it.