Jay DeFeo's Rose didn't smell very sweet, more like noxious fumes.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare knew the potency that true love can have over a person, and Jay DeFeo’s relationship with her iconic painting, The Rose, is a perfect example of the tragic romance that is love.

The remarkable journey of this piece of art began in 1958 in DeFeo’s San Francisco studio. Unbeknownst to her, what began as just another painting soon escalated into the most defining work of DeFeo’s entire career. At the time that DeFeo started this painting, she was a hot commodity in the contemporary art scene, having group shows in New York with trendy artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. As glamorous as the hip New York art scene was, it was clearly not as enticing as her tantalizing vixen The Rose, for she soon retreated from the spotlight to fixate solely on this painting for the next eight years.

I have always heard that life becomes much more rich and full of meaning when we come to love something so much that we would be willing to die for it. For DeFeo, her bittersweet love for The Rose ultimately became the force that pushed her down the path towards her inevitable demise. In the eight years she spent as a hermit creating this piece, she was exposed to so much lead and turpentine fumes from the paint that she actually got lead poisoning, went crazy, and lost all of her teeth!

So was it worth the destruction of DeFeo’s social life, health, and mind? I would say so. This behemoth of a painting stands just short of 11 ft tall, weighs 2,300 pounds, and is almost a foot thick in places. Can you imagine how much money she spent on paint for this piece? Clearly too much, for in 1965, DeFeo could no longer afford her San Francisco rent and was evicted, leaving her with no choice but to stop working on this piece and give it to the Pasadena Museum of Art. After a short stay at the museum, the piece was then moved to the San Francisco Art Institute where it was covered in plaster and hidden in a wall where it lived for almost two decades until the Whitney Museum in New York decided to bring this beauty back to life. They spent a whopping $250,000 restoring this piece and shipping it across the country to its permanent home.

Now that’s a true love story right there. DeFeo went crazy and destroyed her health in pursuit of her true love. The result is one of the most stunning abstract paintings of our time. Thanks for taking one for the team Jay!