Art wrap

diebenkorn in the Cauldron of the Fifties

By John Blee

July 2008

Photo: Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) Untitled (Albuquerque), 1952 Oil on canvas 68 3/4 x 60 inches The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California © The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn

Is it the landscape or body? And yet there is a “Disintegrating Pig” and a horse/dog-like creature with a phallus; but there are also the almost literal landscapes and always vignettes of landscape-feeling. It is biomorphism, but with a landscape paradigm. It is Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, at the Phillips Collection (1600 21st Street, NW Tues. – Wed. 10 a.m.–5 pm, Thu. 10 am - 8:30 pm, Fri. – Sat. 10 am – 5pm, Sun. 11 am  - 6 pm.)

New Mexico was crucial to breakthroughs in the work of  Diebenkorn, Georgia O’Keefe and Stuart Davis. Far from the center of the New York School, but very much a player in these New Mexico works, Diebenkorn hits and maintains a very high level. Many of these paintings, drawings, and even the one sculpture, hold up with the best art of a very charged moment.

Recently, a French dealer of the latest photography was looking at paintings in New York from the fifties with me and declared, “The fifties was it.” Also, the period was very important for American poetry, music (classical and jazz) and dance (ballet and modern).  It was a tremendous nexus. 

Diebenkorn’s first mature abstractions were hatched while he was in San Francisco. They do not match the freedom and assurance in the New Mexico works.  Diebenkorn’s first attachment was to the work of Edward Hopper, also seen in his painting of the later fifties. It was Diebenkorn’s veering from the abstract to the figurative that gave him the profile he had when I first encountered his work.  There is a similarity to de Kooning’s own on-again off-again tryst with abstraction.  In fact, it was from reproductions of black and white de Koonings from around 1950 that Diebenkorn departed and the New Mexico oeuvre was born. It is incredible how well Diebenkorn was able to read those reproductions!

One sees the X-shape of de Kooning in Diebenkorn: not quite as elegant, not quite as stressed.  Diebenkorn is from this moment a master of composition. While there is a falling off in the quality of his abstract works after this period leading to the realist phase, it is his balancing of shapes that always holds. His color is never surprising; it is always sure. His paint quality (described by a colleague of his as “piss–thin”) is always felt.

In Diebenkorn’s color in these works one senses the light and air of New Mexico.  It is a very different light and air from the Santa Monica of his Ocean Park series.  Those were born from his encounter with Matisse’s “Zorah on the Terrace.”

Working at Gemini G.E.L. I met Diebenkorn and observed his interaction with the master printers.  One of them had convinced Diebenkorn to take a single state of a lithograph and turn it into a print in its own right.  It was named, somewhat ironically, after the printer.  The printers were each given prints, worth tens of thousands of dollars for each edition they produced. Thus, it was in their interest to get as many prints as they could. Diebenkorn was being importuned to take another single state of a litho and make a finished print out of it. He very gently said no.

In my interaction with Diebenkorn, I found him articulate and open, talking about art in the jargon of the fifties.  He seemed almost ordinary, without the airs of a master; he was centered and unassuming. Roy Lichtenstein, who was there at the same time, all but wagged his tail at the appearance of the awful Marsha Weisman (collector, and sister of Norton Simon and wife of Fred) while almost not speaking to anyone else. Diebenkorn did say that he could not wait to get back to his studio to paint. Almost everyone who worked printing at Gemini was an artist, though not so fortunate as to have a studio in Santa Monica!

In Diebenkorn’s late works, mostly small, there is a revisiting of the compositional structure and vocabulary of the New Mexico works.  In the early fifties works he wanted to move toward the edge, to open the center.  There are signs and glyphs in the works in the Phillips’ show that he uses in his Abschied. Somehow it is touching that Diebenkorn went back to the first moment of his completely coming into full being as a painter to bid farewell.  (Through September 7.)