Sonia Gechtoff. Children of Frejus, 1959. Oil paint on canvas; 76 3/4 x 102 in. Photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
During her years in California, women, including Gechtoff, became artistic leaders. Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery gave its first solo exhibition to Sonia Gechtoff and Deborah Remington helped found the Six Gallery (the historic artist-run cooperative especially notable for the October 1955 reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg that launched the Beat movement). Created over 8 years, Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting The Rose, weighing about a ton and eleven inches thick, began its celebrity turn.