What happens after the masterpiece? For the artist Jay DeFeo, who worked on her monumental oil painting The Rose (1958–1966) for eight years until it was nearly 11 inches thick and weighed over 2,000 pounds, the answer was clear: Do not attempt a repeat.

Instead, DeFeo experimented widely throughout the 1970s, playing with drawing and collage and photography and reworking old pieces into new ones in her Northern California studio. When she did paint, she went with acrylics. She didn’t touch oil again for almost two decades. Eventually DeFeo found her way back to oil paint, buoyed by financial stability and a hard-won confidence. The subsequent paintings she made in the 1980s represent some of the most riveting abstract work to come out of the American postwar period. Many have rarely

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