Word: painter
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...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 dictum in the American avant-garde that radicalism had to mean abstraction, pointed him still closer toward the figurative...
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...
...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 the immediacy and verve one associates...
Five-foot-tall painter Angelina Byrnes completes Hartley's endearing circle of friends. He meets her, of all places, at the VD clinic, and she soon draws in him and Robert with her sparkling intelligence and inspired nine-foot-high paintings. Angie, like Hartley and unlike Robert, works first and plays second. Eccentric and ambitious, she saws holes in her apartment so she can slide her enormous paintings through the floor when they don't fit in doorways, calls friends at 3 a.m. to borrow blue paint and dreams of seeing her work in the lobby of the Museum...
...Voltaire might have had, was post-Civil War New Orleans. Not a mere metropolis, New Orleans was an emerging economic powerhouse ridden with racial tension, an elegant locus of brilliance of all sorts, and very nearly, if Christopher Benfey is to be believed, a living, breathing entity. The great painter Edgar Degas sojourned in this charmed city for several months in 1872 and 1873, and an enamored Benfey seized the coincidence as an opportunity to write a diffuse paean to the Crescent City and her denizens, and incidentally to Degas...