Word: diebenkorn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Discharged from the military in 1945, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts. Over the next several years, he moved between the East and West coasts. His work from the late '40s to the early '50s was essentially abstract, though with strong overtones of landscape space and color. A considerable influence of Willem de Kooning bore on it. De Kooning, Diebenkorn felt, "had it all, could outpaint anybody, at least until the mid-'60s, when he began to lose it." But Diebenkorn's friendship with the Bay Area painter David Park, who bravely refused to accept the reigning...
...Diebenkorn's figurative phase was well and truly under way, all its parts integrated, in landscape, figure painting and still life. But it's necessary to realize, and the show makes this quite clear, that for all his shifts between degrees of abstraction and figuration, Diebenkorn remained essentially the same artist; he wasn't someone trying on different suits to see which ones...
...Park series, forming in a small, early landscape like Seawall, 1957. First, the clear marine light that seems to bathe all the forms, whether sharply cut (the tawny beach and wedges of black shadow on the left) or vaguer (the tract of scribbled green grass on the right). Second, Diebenkorn's decisiveness about tonal structure and the way sharp contrast can be used both to hollow out the space of the painting and to create a firm, flat pattern. And third, a breezy lyricism of feeling that was especially Diebenkorn's, an exhilaration at the material fullness of the world...
Edward Hopper was one of Diebenkorn's inner jury of admired masters--no other American painter except de Kooning influenced him as much. What he liked in Hopper, Diebenkorn once laconically said, was "the diagonals." Not the mood: you can't extract a Hopperish melancholy from Woman in a Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be thinking doesn't count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence of vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky, the tabletop rushing away to the right...
This virile structure enabled Diebenkorn to explore all manner of nuances, shifts of tone, transparencies and textural quirks in the areas of color it defined. It let the picture bear provisional or openly corrected passages, without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle. Structure was the key, not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly more than visual nouns--a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies in it; a knife in another glass, bent by refraction--rendered with...