Richard Dibenkorn
American, 1922-1993
Woman and Checkerboard, 1956
oil on canvas
59 x 56 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase, Second Pacific Coast Biennial Fund
1957.18
Richard Diebenkorn, Self Portrait, 1980, Dry point.
"All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression." - Richard Diebenkorn
RESEARCH PAPER
Many regard Diebenkorn's figurative painting as his most powerful works and this work is a fine example of his figurative style. He is a major figure in the art style that's come to be known as the Bay Area Figurative that flourished in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1940's through the mid-1960's. Henry Hopkins describes the paintings as being inspired by existentialism and the beginnings of the Beat Generation and depicting "passive individuals existing without spiritual support in lonely environments."
In Woman and Checkerboard we see a solitary female figure (his main model was his wife, Phyllis) seated in a sparsely furnished room (table, checkerboard, chair, "window" or painting on the wall) in a "lonely environment." Look first at her face. She's mask-like and almost featureless. Does she look at us? No, she stares out with unseeing eyes and unfocussed gaze.
The unseeing eyes and unfocused gaze contribute to a mood of loneliness and isolation. What is in the center of the canvas? Nothing! A void! That's significant. Usually "centers" feature the most important incident. We'll develop this theme of loneliness and isolation as we go along.
Where is the woman located on the canvas? She is pushed to the extreme right edge of the painting. (We know that Matisse was one of Diebenkorn's mentors. Her location illustrates Matisse's influence; Matisse also grouped incident at the edges of the canvas. Others signs of Matisse's influence: the retention of changes of thought -the visible record of the history of change. Matisse and Diebenkorn share yet another trait - both are intuitive colorists.) How can Diebenkorn place her there and still have her be the focus of the painting? What leads our eye into the painting? Locate the checkerboard and see how it leads us in and across to the woman. Note how the checkerboard contributes to the loneliness - it's empty. No game pieces. No other players.
Do you sense any movement or motion in the painting? What creates the static and motionless effect? Note the strong verticals - the erect and passively immobile woman, the table leg, the line next to the window/painting. Note the strong horizontals - the table, the checkerboard, the line on the back wall. There's scarcely a diagonal line in the painting. Diagonals create movement. Strong verticals and horizontals create stillness.
The color choices influence the mood of the painting. It's generally murky, dark, and somber. There's an orderly, somber march of muted, layered color. His color choices are subdued in some passages and intense in others. What colors does he choose for her face? (orange and blue) For her clothing? (red and green) For the window? (purple and yellow) These three color combinations are all complementary colors - opposites on the color wheel. Something visually remarkable is achieved when complementaries are placed next to each other. They intensify each other For example (look at her face again), when the orange and blue are placed side by side, the orange appears more orange and the blue appears more blue. We've seen Chagall working the same idea in Young Girl in Pursuit. These areas add excitement as they contrast with the large somber areas of the background and the center.
The lack of detail contributes to the lonely mood. The figure and objects are pared down to bare essentials. We've talked about the spareness of the room. Back to her face: how detailed is it? (The mood of loneliness and isolation could, perhaps, reflect the alienation of contemporary life - a theme developed by other artists, such as Edward Hopper, another of Diebenkorn's influences.)
Is this painting about the woman or about paint? The woman is more a vehicle for paint than a character study or portrait! One critic said that for Diebenkorn to invest too much personality in his sitter would tip the balance to the narrative at the expense of the sensuality of paint on the picture surface. The tug of war between observed subject (usually a female figure in a room doing very little. There's characteristically a sense of ordinariness)and painting process is a theme of Diebenkorn's and of modernism in general.
Diebenkorn's painting style began in abstraction, moved to the figurative, and then shifted back again to abstraction. Even in this figurative piece, we're not far from abstraction - we've noted the pared down detail. This work shows the hand of the artist and the process of art making - two major Abstract Expressionist characteristics. Diebenkorn allows his corrections to show. The revisions, the accidental effects, the glimpses of underlying brush strokes, the drippings and scrapings all add to the vitality and creative energy of his work. The scratching out and the revealing of layers of color allow us to see what he did. It's exciting to see the choices - to see the process of making art.
Summary of how Diebenkorn achieved a mood of Loneliness and Isolation:
1. placement of figure on extreme right edge - almost pushed out of the painting.
2. sparsely furnished, almost empty room. Pared down to 2 chairs (one empty), a checkerboard (empty of pieces), a table, a window or painting.
3. The center of the painting is a void.
4. The colors are generally subdued.
5. the woman's eyes are dark hollows - just suggested.The blue hollows do not look at us.
6. use of strong verticals and horizontals which create a static, motionless, still, frozen scene.
Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council by Faith Henkin,1996
Website Preparer: Cliff Hauenstein, 2004
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atkins, Robert, ArtSpeak, a guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, Abbeville Press, New York, 1990.
Eldertield, John, The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, catalog for a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Houston Fine Art Press, 1988. Hopkins, Henry, 50 West Coast Artists, Chronicle Books, San Francisco.
Hughes, Robert, "The Decisive Line of a Master," Time, December 12, 1988.
Kimmelman, Michael, "Elegant Playful images of Diebenkorn" in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, exhibition catalog, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y, 1976.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, "Richard Diebenkorn, Artist of the Month," Gallery Notes, Vol. II, No. 12, October 1977.
COMMENTS
Abstract Expressionism
One of the most distinctive aspects of Diebenkorn’s career is the way it can be divided into three clear phases. He first emerged as an artist of significance in the 1950s, as the Abstract Expressionism pioneered by the likes of Pollock and de Kooning was making waves in the east coast art scene. Diebenkorn flew the flag for the movement out west in Berkeley, Urbana and Albuquerque, alongside the likes of Clyfford Still. During this period he produced a range of energetic, colourful works that Thomas Williams, writing in Artists & Illustrators, has described as “among the most dynamic and brilliant of his career”.
The figurative revolt
In the mid-1950s, however, Diebenkorn took a very different path. His return to the San Francisco Bay area followed three years in New Mexico and Illinois, and he continued pursuing abstract painting for the next few years. But by 1956, he completely abandoned Abstract Expressionism in favour of figurative painting – distinctly out of fashion at the time. It was a move that provoked outrage. Fellow Californian artist Ernest Briggs accused him of being a “moral sell-out.” But it also marked Diebenkorn apart as an artist unafraid to follow his own artistic impulses, whatever the prevailing winds of the period. Very soon, he became equally well known and successful as a Bay Area Figurative artist. As our exhibition demonstrates, however, for Diebenkorn, figuration was not some quixotic decision but a logical extension beyond the self-imposed limits of abstraction.
Ocean Park
The late 1960s marked the beginning of the final phase of Diebenkorn’s career. Following his move to Santa Monica in order to take up a professorship at UCLA in 1967, Diebenkorn returned to abstraction in a sequence of works now known as the Ocean Park series. These geometric abstractions became the focus of Diebenkorn’s work for two decades. The paintings are
among the most important in recent art history and have been described by the Boston Globe as “some of the most beautiful works of art created in America or anywhere else since the Second World War”.
European Modernism
Although these three phases may at first sound disconnected, two clear threads run through Diebenkorn’s career. The first is the strong relationship that all his work has with the great figures of European Modernism – especially Cézanne, Matisse, and Mondrian, for whom he had a deep admiration. Diebenkorn travelled across Europe between 1964 and ’65 and the influence of works such as Matisse’s View of Notre-Dame (1914) is clearly visible in the subsequent Ocean Park series.
The poetics of place
The second continuous thread is Diebenkorn’s sensitivity to place: changes in his life frequently led to changes in his work. “Very often,” Diebenkorn has said, “if you go to the locale where an artist works, you’ll suddenly really know that you’re in this person’s area.” He cites the Arles of Van Gogh and the Florence of Piero della Francesca, but he may just as well have been talking about himself. Few artists can have captured the unique space and light of California quite like Richard Diebenkorn.
Excerpted from Tom Jeffreys, "Richard Diebenkorn: A Unique Talent ", The Royal Academy, February 2015
When Richard Diebenkorn got off a plane in San Francisco, California, he was not the same person who boarded in New Mexico. It was the 1950s, and the artist was then an MFA student in Albuquerque, taking his first flight in order to see an Arshile Gorky retrospective at SFMOMA. Diebenkorn peered out the window and found himself with an eye-opening vantage point so intense that later biographers would refer to the moment as an “epiphany”; the unusual aerial perspective from the low-flying plane created a flattened landscape and broad planes of color that would influence the painter’s work for the rest of his life.
Diebenkorn was an Abstract Expressionist. This is not, however, another story of a New York art world superhero, an enfant terrible, or a glamorous occupant of Greenwich Village or Andy Warhol’s Factory. There are no teetering skyscrapers or midnight bumps of amphetamine. Instead, there is prickly scrub brush, golden dust, and some slow-moving fog.
The artist’s canvases depicting afternoon shadow and slanted light, with swathes of ocean blue and sandy yellow, are a product of the West Coast. Born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn would spend most of his life moving up and down the coast of California, living and working in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. As an undergraduate studying studio art and art history at Stanford University, he was introduced to Sarah Stein, who shared her famous sister-in-law Gertrude’s love of collecting—her house boasted works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cézanne.
From there, Diebenkorn’s engagement with art history (and the art of his own time) continued apace. He first encountered artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Mark Rothko during a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps in the early 1940s that put him in Virginia, an easy enough trek to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (The Diebenkorn Foundation takes care to list when he saw which artists; it’s clear each museum visit set new painterly cogs turning.)
After his military service, Diebenkorn took advantage of the G.I. Bill to enroll in the California School of Fine Arts in 1946, where he met David Park. (Later, he, Park, Elmer Bischoff, and James Weeks would form the catalyst for the Bay Area Figurative Movement together.) Diebenkorn spent the next several years moving around the country with Phyllis, his wife. Without her, it’s unlikely we would know as much as we do about Richard; she catalogued all his work, helped mount exhibitions, and formed the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation after his death, all in addition to her position as a psychology professor. The pair settled in Berkeley in 1953, where he had a studio on Shattuck Avenue. Over the next 40 years, they would move from Berkeley to Santa Monica to the rural Northern California town of Healdsburg, with the artist’s painting style shifting at various points from Abstract Expressionism to figuration, and back to abstraction.
In the mid-1940s, however, Diebenkorn was firmly situated in Abstract Expressionism, influenced by a few months spent in New York and the prevailing art world trends of the day. This period in his career culminated in the “Berkeley” series: compositions where the titular city’s woody hills are vaguely recognizable among stacked green planes.
By the time 1955 rolled around, however, Diebenkorn broke with tradition (and the market) by returning to representational painting. His work from around this time is full of ordinary objects—scissors, end tables, some California poppies in a glass. These everyday displays are far from ordinary, however, imbued with a gentle beauty that might make you look twice at the scissors and half a lemon lying on your own kitchen table. He also painted and sketched an endless array of nude women, suggesting, among other things, that Diebenkorn valued this staple of art history (even as his choice to employ live models placed him at odds with his Abstract Expressionist peers).
It’s his landscapes from the era that really captivate, though. Works like Marin Landscape (1961–62) or Cityscape #1 (1963) both capture quiet, unpopulated locations whose broad planes of color—remnants of that earlier aerial “epiphany”—lend a sense of vastness and unhurried time to the paintings. They are representational, certainly, but feel as if they could easily slip back into abstraction.
Despite his ongoing stylistic evolution, the common thread throughout Diebenkorn’s career is the way he rendered light in both his figurative and abstract paintings. In 1962’s Interior with Doorway, for example, the contrast between the deep shadow hiding a plastic folding chair and the almost aggressive brightness streaming through an open door elevates the ordinary seat to an object of quiet, meditative glory.
Matisse was a particularly impactful and lifelong influence; “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” a 2017 exhibition at SFMOMA, explored this visual lineage. Diebenkorn even made a trip to Leningrad in 1964 to see the Matisses hidden from the non-Communist world in the State Hermitage Museum. Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad (1965) paints one of the more obvious connections: the organic, curving shapes echo the wallpaper from the French artist’s Harmony in Red (1908), with the shade of blue bringing to mind his “Blue Nude” series (1952), or perhaps his cut-outs. However, the intense strip of light on the wall in Diebenkorn’s work and the lawn meeting the ocean place the viewer firmly in California territory.
When Diebenkorn shifted back to abstraction later in the 1960s, his interest in light shifted with him. This interest culminated in his “Ocean Park” series, depictions of Southern California that the artist worked on for 20 years after moving to Santa Monica in 1966. The abstract canvases don’t explicitly depict sun pouring through windows, but rather act more like the windows themselves—glowing with lavender, soft gray, and pale gold, they exhibit what Sarah Bancroft, who curated the 2012 exhibition “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” calls “a riotous calm.”
The “Ocean Park” series is arguably Diebenkorn’s most famous—these works certainly fetch the highest prices at auction. Recently, Christie’s offered (and sold) 12 Diebenkorn works in a row, setting a new record of $21 million and signalling burgeoning market enthusiasm in his work. A recent show at Acquavella Galleries may have helped the sale—in March, the gallery put on a joint show between Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud called “California Landscapes,” where they paired—you guessed it—California landscapes, exploring the two friends’ usage of color, light, and perspective.
Those who know Diebenkorn love the way his work brings a space to life. During a 2015 show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, the Financial Times remarked that “the Sackler Wing has seldom looked more seductively cool, or felt more keenly evocative of place.” Diebenkorn’s fans may be devoted, but they are small in number—one can only wonder if it’s because he eschewed the high-profile art world of New York for a decidedly calmer existence. With increasing attention at auction, along with recent and upcoming exhibitions—the exhibition “Beginnings,” exploring his early work, is in the midst of a year-and-a-half run across the country—this quiet California artist may finally be getting the recognition he deserves.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-richard-diebenkorn-brought-california-light-abstract-expressionism