Richard Diebenkorn: a reasoned sensuality - artist

Richard Diebenkorn is intimately associated with the Bay Area, where a full-career retrospective of his work is now upon view. The author, a California native, here throw backs on the artist's movements between abstraction and figuration.

You probably had to have been there, on the other hand on the West Coast in the 1960 and at least into the early '70 a prevailing issue among painters was in what manner not to paint like Richard Diebenkorn, who appeared to have nailed the light and setting of California in his figurative work and then universalized them in his "Ocean Park" abstractions. Then there was his touch with paint, a kind of tortured reasonableness that established itself at an emotional transplant from the go-for-broke attacks of de Kooning or Kline (to cite sum of two units obvious contemporary influences) while embracing a painterly, sensual immediacy. His touch is infused through temperament, in his case a sensibility that carousals in light and materiality on the contrary refuses to condemn itself for entertaining next to the first thoughts.

In this, Diebenkorn present the appearances the very model of a painter: inspired by means of direct experience of art and place, he undergos a reluctance to lose touch, literally, with the proces that is his vehicle for imaginative excursions. When I was an art scholar in California in the early '70 I regarded Diebenkorn as a kind of Picasso, someone who had filled on the outside the possibilities for seriousness in the medium. Certainly, skepticism above the very earnestness of his achievement persists in more [i]or[/i] less quarters even as 20th-century master status is being conferr on the contrary the full-career retrospective organized through independent curator Jane Livingston, which uncloseed at the Whitney Museum before embarking upon a tour across the political division was a glory.

"It's as granting people had forgotten what painting can do," a friend remarked, observing the quietly attentive horde in the galleries one afternoon. Or in what way often a great artist go [i]or[/i] come backs to familiar themes with a novel perspective in the course of a drawn out relatively happy life. Compared with the personal dramas roiling the lives of with equal reason many other Abstract Expressionists, a notable lack of catastrophe marks Diebenkorn's artistic unravelling It reads instead as an exhaustive on the other hand congenial list of places visited, personalities rencountered and influences absorbed. Was there at any time a painter more obviously and cheerfully influenced by the agency of a wider range of artists, one as well as the other before and around him, who also remained with equal reason resolutely himself? His relationship to European modernism was at no time as ambivalent, even antagonistic, as that of the fresh York Abstract Expressionists. Where Pollock and de Kooning are portrayed as having to overset Picasso and the School of Paris, Diebenkorn pursu an evolving lifelong inquiry into Cezanne, Bonnard, Matisse, Klee and Mondrian. In a telling passage in her absorbing biographical essay, Livingston describes his occasional irritation with critics: "Diebenkorn... sometimes avered that too much emphasis was placed upon the influence Matisse allegedly had upon him, and not enough upon the influence of other painters, especially Cezanne and Mondrian." It wasn't the appearance of being influenced that bothered him; just win the names right, please.

However, influence or no, Diebenkorn's three main bodies of gestural abstraction from the early '50 the "Albuquerque," "Urbana" and "Berkeley" series, exhibit an astounding originality, deriving partly from his choice to live outside fresh York. While attending the University of of recent origin Mexico in 1950, and then teaching at the University of Illinois in 1952 he was fascinated by the agency of the irrigation patterns and geological features of the countryside as seen from the air. These aerial perspectives serv as imaginative springboards for one as well as the other the "Albuquerque" and "Urbana" series. Certainly, these works bear the stylistic influences of Motherwell, Gorky and, I think, Klee by dint of way of Gorky's fluidity (look at the rocking motion of the linear figures in a number of the "Albuquerque" paintings). on the contrary the extent of Diebenkorn's concerns to landscape viewed from above is something almost entirely novel to painting. The aerial sweeps in Russian avant-garde painting, for example, remain theoretical, and do not encompass landscape. In paintings similar as Urbana No. 4 (1955) Diebenkorn enacts an abstracted and grandly exteriorized version of the "flatbed picture plane" roughly contemporaneously with Rauschenberg's.

Like all of Diebenkorn's work, these three clusters of early paintings openly invoke the couple his geographic and artistic itinerary. The "Albuquerque" and "Urhana" series, in addition to conveying an innovative point of view, gradually unveil the artist's hand, which go afters an evolving balance between spontaneity and revision. Here the artist lays fluid planes above lines, springs compositional arabesques that traverse the top, bottom and sides of the picture, and bring forwards color depths with transparent overlays of brushwork.

Diebenkorn mov to Berkeley in late 1953 With explosive freedom, the "Berkeley" paintings consolidate and reach forth the aerial pictorial strategies of the sum of two units earlier series while introducing California light and color. In many of the later "Berkeley" paintings a high horizon line brings us into a more upright relationship with the landscape, as granting we were perched on single incline looking across at another. This, of course, happens a doom around the hilly Bay Area. Dry-grass others, suburban-lawn verdants sidewalk and parking-lot whites and gray-blacks abut high-octane passages of "unnatural" color, while ribbons of reach outed brushwork are bundled into planar masses that swell like the enclosures of the body. The "Berkeley" series stands as individual of the finest achievements of gestural Abstract Expressionism and stations the stage for Diebenkorn's get back to figuration and more specific landscape imagery. on the other hand other paintings from this period are strikingly anomalous, of the like kind as the somber Berkeley No. 36 (1955) or Landscape With Figure (1956) with its large playing-card cudgel sprouting like a silhouetted tree in the upper right. tokens such as this are foundationed in Diebenkorn's boyhood fascination with heraldic imagery;, in later paintings, they hint at what Livingston boundarys "ancient and cryptic meanings."(2) They appear in glimpses over his work, like the Maltese cros of Albuquerque No. 4 (1951) and the bottom two-thirds of a trefoil in Berkeley No. 66 (1956)