Over time, she built up and scraped away the paint, again and again, gluing the work to an even larger canvas to center it more precisely. Every day she went to work on what she finally decided to call The Rose, although it never resembled one. For years she did almost nothing else, surviving, it was said, sometimes on brandy and cigarettes. Increasingly, she withdrew from company. People started to talk. The work went through phases and names. . . . Finally, in 1969, eleven years after she had begun working on it, The Rose was exhibited, but by then the art world had changed. Conceived in the era of Jackson Pollock and the Beats, the painting, a massive gray monolith of strange delicacy and gloomy bohemianism, emerged in the age of Pop art and psychedelia. A reviewer dubbed it "a glorious anachronism." It was falling apart. Slabs of paint were sliding off it like lava from a volcano.