Jay DeFeo's The Rose

When Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting The Rose was fork-lifted out of the bay window of her secondstorey apartment in San Francisco – taking a piece of the wall with it – Bruce Conner, who filmed the scene, worried DeFeo might leap out after it. It was 1965, and for seven years the artist had worked on nothing else. Chain-smoking, drinking brandy and piling paint upon paint, DeFeo created a colossus that eventually wei...