Word: diebenkorns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Foot for square foot, the current retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's paintings at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art offers more aesthetic pleasure than any other show--at least of contemporary art--in town. Which isn't to say the Whitney has done the subject full justice. Its heart being where it is, the museum needed lots and lots of space to present a mass of trivia and threadbare junk from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa., pointlessly documenting the pallid maestro's effect on advertising and fashion, under the title "The Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion...
Except for an excellent show of his drawings curated by John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, never had a fair deal from New York museums. The city's cultural establishment viewed him as, well, a California artist--a bit of an outsider, a bit marginal, insufficiently difficult or radical, too easy on the eye, whatever. Diebenkorn, one of the most flintily self-critical artists who ever lived in America, took this in his stride, and his oeuvre (closed, alas, too early) handily answers his detractors. Nobody who cares about painting...
Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, Diebenkorn was raised in San Francisco and got his first art education there--a process interrupted by his enlistment in the Marine Corps. This, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since he was posted to Quantico, Va., and while there was able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist...
Hopper gives us a created world, not one that is merely recorded. Everything in it is shaped by memory, sympathy, distance and formal imperatives. Nothing is there merely because it "was there." Mark Rothko hated diagonals, but loved Hopper's. Richard Diebenkorn loved diagonals and loved Hopper's too. As well anyone might: the diagonal, the slanting patch (especially of light) becomes a wonderfully expressive element in Hopper, acting both as a structural brace for the actual painted surface and as a sign of fugitive reality in imagined space. In Morning Sun, 1952, you are acutely aware that...
...early Pollocks, the 1943 Guardians of the Secret. It has good groups of pictures by Clyfford Still and Philip Guston, but strangely enough it is relatively weak where it should be rock solid-in San Francisco art. Most of the top Bay Area names are represented-Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Manuel Neri, William Wiley and so on-but not always with works of the first quality. The uninitiated visitor would hardly guess how strong a creative center San Francisco has been over the past half-century, or how much of its value lies in its distinctive...