Richard Diebenkorn (B

Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922, Portland, Oregon; d. 1993, Berkeley, California) by Rachel Federman Richard Diebenkorn’s abstract paintings are frequently named for the places in which they were painted: Albuquerque, Urbana, Berkeley, Ocean Park. This has contributed to the prevailing sense that they embody a particular location’s light, atmosphere, or topography. It has been noted, for instance, that when he moved to Albuquerque, “the infinitely nuanced earth tones and topographic anomalies of New Mexico’s landscapes began to pour into his paintings and drawings.”1 And the “brilliant jewel tones” of several Berkeley paintings are said to “evoke the verdancy and luminosity of Northern California.”2 Diebenkorn’s own commentary on this subject typically fell along a spectrum of disavowal and acceptance. In an oft-cited statement from 1956, he explained: “What I paint often seems to pertain to landscape but I try to avoid any rationalization of this either in my painting or in later thinking about it. I’m not a landscape painter (at this time, at any rate) or I would paint landscape directly.”3 In retrospect, however, things were not quite as clear-cut; in 1983 he conceded: “I was shocked when I was up in the San Francisco area a month ago. It had been raining a lot and the hills were green, and driving through Northern California on the way home I couldn’t believe a lot of the color! Then I started to think, ‘God, that is the color I used to use, when I lived up here!’”4 Diebenkorn later resolved this dialectic by suggesting that it was only through the process of creating the paintings that he learned about these qualities of place: “I really don’t know about the light of the place until I’ve worked in that place for some time. And then I can tell you about the light looking at the painting.”5 Diebenkorn’s practice of developing a painting on the canvas is integral to the completed works, which bear the traces of his improvisational process. Visibly worked and reworked, his paintings do not represent places so much as they approximate the contingent and ever-changing experience of living in a place. This experience is characterized as much by emotion as it is by physical qualities. A well-known 1957 profile in Art News, “Diebenkorn Paints a Picture”—part of a series that brought readers into artists’ studios—underscores the role of metamorphosis in his work. Among other changes, it chronicles the transformation of a painting’s male subject into a woman.6 The article reports that Diebenkorn considered the painting, which he titled Woman by the Ocean (1956), to be complete when “the relationship of the figure and the setting seem[ed] psychologically right.”7 When an interviewer later asked the artist if the light and “sense of color” of Los Angeles were responsible for his shift, in 1967, from the figurative mode chronicled in “Diebenkorn Paints a Picture” to the abstraction of his Ocean Park paintings, Diebenkorn replied: “Absolutely. And then there is another thing, that’s not easy to say . I left my figurative friends behind.”8 The “figurative friends” were the painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff, whom Diebenkorn first met at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, now the San Francisco Art Institute [SFAI]), where he had been a student and then a teacher from 1946 to 1949. When he returned to Northern California in 1953, after completing his master of fine arts at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he participated in evening figure-drawing sessions with Park and Bischoff. 9 He began to paint figuratively in 1954, and together the three artists came to be viewed as the spine of the burgeoning Bay Area Figurative movement.10 Between 1953 and 1956, the years leading up to and coinciding with his unexpected and controversial move into figuration, Diebenkorn created some of his most celebrated abstract works, titled for Berkeley, California, the city in which he then lived and worked. These canvases, like his Albuquerque and Urbana paintings of the preceding years, demonstrate the artist’s assimilation of the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, then the dominant mode of painting in both New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. His abstract Berkeley paintings and drawings, for example, clearly seem to be in dialogue with contemporaneous works by Willem de Kooning (see fig. 2).11 Yet while Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock were hailed by critic Harold Rosenberg as “action painters” for their intensely physical style of applying drips, smears, and splashes of paint to the canvas, the seeming spontaneity of Diebenkorn’s canvases is belied by his tendency to extensively rework them. Documentation of an early state of Berkeley #23 demonstrates the gulf that could exist between the artist’s first pass at a painting and its final composition. In unpublished studio notes, Diebenkorn confessed that as a young man he viewed such revisions with shame, as markers of a failed performance. He later came to realize, however, “that the arts of painting, writing and composing music were intrinsically activities that partake of revision.”12 The presence of pentimenti—traces of earlier states and alterations—in his work connects him with Henri Matisse, whose art he encountered at key junctures in his career. As art historian Ruth E. Fine has noted: “From Matisse, Diebenkorn learned about layering color, manipulating paint with great subtlety so a hue applied on top of others would reveal nuances below, scumbling, painting wet into wet, rubbing color in and scraping it away.”13 Diebenkorn’s predilection for altering his compositions is apparent both within and between works. The fifty-eight extant abstract Berkeley paintings, created in fewer than three years, demonstrate an extraordinary range of painterly and compositional effects. Whereas the vertically oriented Berkeley #23 is full of frenetic energy, its seemingly hastily applied fields of color vying for visual supremacy with meandering calligraphic lines, Berkeley #47 (1955) seeks to contain its gestural brushwork within a structure of horizontal bands. Although resolutely abstract, both paintings evoke a landscape viewed from above. Diebenkorn spoke effusively about a daytime flight he took from Albuquerque to San Francisco in 1951: “I guess it was the combination of desert and agriculture that really turned me on, because it had so many things I wanted in my paintings. Of course, the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’. It was all like flat design—and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid.”14 His fascination with aerial perspectives was bolstered in 1970, when a commission from the United States Department of the Interior took him high above the Salt River and Lower Colorado River basins in Arizona.15 By that time Diebenkorn was already several years into his Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967 following his relocation to Southern California to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and which he titled after the Santa Monica neighborhood where he established his studio. The series, which came to comprise works on paper in addition to paintings, would occupy him for much of the rest of his career. The more rigid geometries that define the interior spaces of his figurative works became Diebenkorn’s central focus. Liberated from the burden of representing the “concentration of psychology which a person is,” the Ocean Park canvases are marked nevertheless by the physical and psychological labor of their own creation.16 At one hundred inches high and eighty-one inches across, they “embody his own extension.”17 “That means something,” a friend of the artist’s later noted, also recalling that Diebenkorn “would pop up on his little stool to reach the tops” of the expansive works.18 Continuing a practice begun during his Albuquerque years, and underscoring the relationship between painting and drawing that inheres in much of his oeuvre, Diebenkorn marked the surfaces of works like Ocean Park #54 (1972) and Ocean Park #122 (1980) not only with thinly applied oil paints, but also with charcoal lines that critic Mario Naves has described as part of the “diligent scaffolding that is [Piet] Mondrian’s gift to Diebenkorn.”19 In these paintings, as in the figurative works, Matisse’s influence is also evident, especially that of his French Window at Collioure (1914), an unusually spare composition, bordering on abstract, which Diebenkorn encountered in 1966 at the University Art Gallery at UCLA. Diebenkorn’s “diligent scaffolding” goes further, eliminating even that austere painting’s minimal illusionism. In many of the Ocean Park paintings, the juxtaposition of broad, open fields of color with more concentrated clusters of visual incident is complicated by visible layers of accretion. As art historian John Elderfield has written: The drawing is subsumed, or nearly so. Corrections are made: areas scraped and repainted, new color layers added, new drawing—in charcoal and with a brush—to reaffirm the motif. The surface remains thin, yet advertises very visibly this history of its growth. Since nothing is hidden from us, our perception of a painting is also the perception of its means and method. We cannot help but recognize the extended time of its making.20 Every work of art contains the history of its creation, but Diebenkorn makes this manifest. He once declared himself to be “very sympathetic” to a quote by Mondrian: “Time is a process of intensification.”21 Whereas for Mondrian this process was teleological, leading to ever purer, ever more universal forms, Diebenkorn’s paintings attest to the significance of the process itself, with all of its obstacles and contingencies.

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