Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Florence), 1952

Narrator: DeFeo's artistic training at the University of California, Berkeley had been rigorous and fairly traditional. But like many artists of that time, she encountered the work of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock in magazines. And she'd just spent months traveling around Europe and North Africa, absorbing art history from cave paintings to medieval and Renaissance art and beyond. 

Dana Miller: She's trying to synthesize a lot of complementary aspects, the prehistoric and indigenous cultures, the archetypal imagery that she was looking at with the spontaneity and quick emotive expressionism of what was then considered Abstract Expressionism, and trying to reconcile these things, the sort of cerebral and the emotive into a single work.