Bruce Conner: THE WHITE ROSE

In 1965, Bruce Conner filmed fellow artist Jay DeFeo and her monumental, then-unfinished artwork, The Rose (1958–66), in the moments leading up to its extraction from her San Francisco studio. In an obsessive, implacable quest, DeFeo devoted over eight years of her life to The Rose, a radiant accumulation of mica and oil paint that blurred distinctions between painting and sculpture. Prior to The Rose’s completion, DeFeo was evicted from her studio and forced to uproot her possessions and her art. Conner’s resulting film, THE WHITE ROSE (1967), situates DeFeo’s masterpiece as its protagonist, documenting its forceful prying from the bay window in which it was made, as well as its journey to the sidewalk below and the moving truck that carries it away.

Conner (1933–2008) was a central figure in the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area and a friend of DeFeo. He is regarded as a founder of the Assemblage movement of the 1960s, in which artists poetically integrated found and readymade materials across media including sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, collage, and film. In his practice, Conner demonstrates an affinity for drawing out the magic of both lowly and beautiful things, considering how they might relate to human lives, saying in 1964, “there is always a dialogue going on between objects and people.”

This dialogue is fundamental to THE WHITE ROSE, which functions as an elegiac portrait of artist and artwork. DeFeo circulates the painting, spirit-like, as it departs her studio and home. At one point she lays down onto the work, as if to symbolically fuse herself to it. The filmmaker lingers over the artist, depicting both the pain and the relief that come with this closure.

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Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967 (still). 16mm to 35mm blow-up, black/white, sound, 7 min. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. Courtesy Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles and Thomas Dane Gallery. © 2021 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Aspen Art Museum.

About Bruce Connor

Bruce Conner (1933–2008, b. McPherson, Kansas), who worked in sculpture, collage, painting, drawing, and film, was one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era. Emerging from the California art scene, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. His works have been included in major exhibitions, such as the historic 1961 The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art. Career retrospectives have been presented at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2000)—which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art—and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. His works are represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.