Word: diebenkorns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week eBay canceled the $135,805 sale of a painting touted as a work bought at a garage sale that might be by the late California artist Richard Diebenkorn. EBay claimed the seller, Sacramento lawyer Kenneth A. Walton, placed bids on the painting himself...
...Phillips Collection was to own the finest group of Bonnards in America, and one can easily see their influence pervading the American artists who saw them: how Bonnard's fierce but modulated color and his love of diagonal cuts in the scaffolding of his compositions affected young Richard Diebenkorn, for instance, when he was a Marine based at Quantico, Va.; how the purity of his color challenged Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, for whom visits to the Phillips were like Sunday attendance at church...
...precondition of his structure, in turn, was drawing. Diebenkorn drew incessantly. It wasn't only that he belonged to the last generation of American artists to be raised in a culture of drawing. He loved the act. Drawing was sifting the world's disorder. It was making sense of random agglomerations of things, unconscious postures of the body. (In all his drawings and paintings of his wife Phyllis, you only rarely get the sense that she was actually posing.) Every painter has favorite shapes and gestures, which, unless they encounter some resistance, can turn into mannerisms. Diebenkorn's style certainly...
...climax of Diebenkorn's work was, by general consent, the Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967. Ocean Park is part of Santa Monica, the beachside suburb of Los Angeles where he had his studio. From its high crystalline light, its big calm planes of sea and sky, its cuts and interlacings of highway divider and curb and gable and yellow sand, Diebenkorn produced a marvelous synthesis that, though prolonged through more than 140 large canvases, had very few weak moments...
...Ocean Parks, with their pentimenti and layering left exposed to view, one sees the summation of Diebenkorn's admiration for Matisse's way of leaving the picture with the traces of its own making. This reworking leaves an impression of curiosity, not indecision. The paintings are broadly brushed and then "tuned" by passages of fine, but not fidgety, detail. The color, glazed or discreetly scumbled, is luminous--now diffuse like sea fog, now hard and bright as direct sun. The Ocean Parks radiate an Apollonian calm, an uncoercive authority. They are the creations of a man with a fully integrated...