Art I'm looking at: Recent Shows

Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the good art on view in the Bay Area. I've recently seen Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter (October 14, 2017 – January 28, 2018) at The Legion of Honor, Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World (October 28, 2017 – January 7, 2018), also at The Legion of Honor, and Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942-1955 (October 8, 2017 – January 7, 2018) at the Crocker Museum of Art, in Sacramento.

I didn't need convincing that much ancient statuary and sculpture was once polychromed. We are used to seeing such statuary and sculpture stripped of color, but scholars have long been aware that many pieces preserve virtually invisible traces of pigments, and some pieces retain quite a bit of obvious color. Why were so many scrubbed clean (mostly by 19th century archaeologists and collectors)? A symptom of prejudice perhaps, but at least a result of taste, it seems. Some have argued the practice reflects racism--a deliberate attempt by mostly white males to suggest that the gods were "white like us." That seems a bit far-fetched to me, but my incredulity may be mainly a result of the progress in thinking we've made in the last 150 years (I have no such racial insecurities). Maybe scholars really did feel uncomfortable with colored statuary because of racial prejudice. I can't say. In any case, it seems clear that many felt ancient statues were more aesthetically pleasing without adornment, whatever the underlying, subconscious reason for that feeling.

There are parallels. I own six Japanese wooden chests (tansu). Three we brought back from Japan (where I lived for about 19 years), three we purchased here, in California. The three from Japan retain their original finish. The three purchased locally have been stripped of their color. Tansu usually were finished with stain or lacquer and have mostly acquired a patina of accumulated soot and dirt, but Tansu dealers here typically strip the pieces they buy in Japan because they can't sell them locally to an audience that expects them to be "clean." The patina is prized in Japan, despised here.

I think of carpets from the East and Japanese woodblock prints. Both weavers and print designers were delighted by the introduction of garishly bright (although often fugitive) aniline dyes in the 19th century, while taste among Western scholars and collectors of both rugs and Japanese prints has always shunned the brightest colors.

The reproductions in the Legion of Honor show are based on pigment traces and remnants of patterns found on the statuary. Scholars seem to be fairly confident their recreations are close to reality, but freshly painted, they seem garish and cartoon-like. Perhaps they would have quickly weathered into something much more subtle. Straight from the factory, so to speak, they are startlingly bright. I was reminded of my feelings about new tennis shoes in childhood--bright white shoes I'd always try to quickly dirty by hopping into muddy puddles. A small but thought-provoking show. A final display with samples of some of the pigments found on ancient statuary and modern methods of detecting their presence was particularly engaging, I thought.  

The Klimt/Rodin show is a sensible pairing of the work of contemporaries. The paintings seem right alongside the Rodin sculptures---an impression that contrasts with that created by the incongruous Sarah Lucas sculptures recently shown in some of the same galleries, although the connections between Rodin and Klimt are rather sketchily drawn here. No matter. The show offers an excellent chance to see some important work by Klimt and some rarely displayed drawings by Rodin (I've always thought Rodin's drawings more interesting than his sculpture). Several of the Klimt paintings have never been shown before in the United States.

Among the Klimts are several in the style he's best known for--stylized figures surrounded by and wrapped in bold patterning, such as The Virgin (1913) shown above, but included are some earlier works in a more realistic style, notably Portrait of Sonja Krips (1898), and an interesting unfinished Portrait of a Lady (1917) that brought to mind some of the oil sketches on cardboard done by Toulouse-Lautrec.

There are a number of large, square landscapes I thought reminiscent of Van Gogh (and one of the labels mentioned that they were painted shortly after Klimt had seen works by Van Gogh). A detail of A Garden In Italy (1913) is shown here. The frames on the paintings, too, are worth a careful look. Many are masterpieces of craftsmanship.

The Diebenkorn exhibition now on at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento subtitled Beginnings: 1942-1955, offers a good opportunity to see early works by Diebenkorn not often on view. The show focuses on the period preceding the artist's shift toward figurative work around 1955, but most of what's on display is from the latter part of this early period; there's little here that could be called juvenilia. The earliest pieces date to the time of Diebenkorn's WWII military service. There are a couple of interesting early sketches of fellow soldiers, for example, but the most compelling works are from the rarely seen cubist-influenced period (roughly 1946-1948), and then from the later Sausalito, Albuquerque, and Urbana periods. Diebenkorn moved to Sausalito in 1947, to Albuquerque in 1950, and later spent a year teaching in Urbana, Illinois, during the 1952-1953 school year, before moving to Berkeley, in 1953, after a very brief stay in New York.

I was familiar with the cubist-influenced work from photographs, but this was the first time I'd seen any of it in person. These paintings rely on bold primary colors and often use heavy, black linear elements to separate areas of color. Untitled (The Magician's Table) of 1947 shown here is typical. I struggle to see the later Diebenkorn in these. They are harder, more grid-like, and less subtle than the later work. Diebenkorn's best work I think derives its strength from a sublime balance between the dyadic and the static, from a generally (although not always) muted palette, and a subtle color sense. In the cubist-influnced works of 1946 to 1948 the artist focused on creating bold effects relying on stark contrasts and largely unmodulated, mostly primary colors. Seeing a grouping of them at once is jarring.

But it was not long before Diebenkorn began to find that balance. He also seems to have found a better technical footing. I noticed that the paint is badly crazed in many of the pieces from the cubist-influenced period but rarely so in pieces done after about 1948. And it is from around 1949 that Diebenkorn begins to look like the Diebenkorn we know from around that year to the figurative work that begins about 1955. The colors are softer, the compositions less grid-like. The linear elements are more nuanced. Areas of color start to have rounder, less defined edges. Paint layers become thinner. Reworked areas are allowed to show their history. In short, the paintings acquire a much expanded visual vocabulary, a more subdued palette, and a more sophisticated one. My favorite piece in the show, Untitled (Alburquerque) of 1951 (catalog raisonné No. 1093) is a perfect example of the change in style. The two paintings shown here couldn't be more different. The difference seems to reflect a complete reinvention of self. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. The figurative paintings and then the Ocean Park series of paintings look as different from each other and as different from these two styles as these two look from each other. Diebenkorn was rather good at swinging his rudder and veering off in new directions.

So many of the earlier paintings and drawings are untitled that it would have been helpful to have had each one identified with its number from the catalogue raisonné, but that has not been done. My other complaint would be that many of the large paintings are rather unevenly lighted in the Crocker galleries. But these are quibbles. The show is worthwhile if you're a Diebenkorn fan and haven't seen much work from the early periods. There is a lot here worth looking at and much of it is unlikely to be on view again any time soon. I plan to make a second visit before the show closes in January.

Catalog raisonné No. 795

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Art I'm Looking At: Matisse/Diebenkorn at SF MoMA

Yesterday (March 24) I went to see SF MoMA’s Matisse/Diebenkorn show (March 11 through May 29, 2017). The show has been open here for a couple of weeks. I was hoping crowds would be thin with an initial rush of interest already past, but the galleries were crowded, even on a weekday. Perhaps rain was to blame, as a ticket-taker suggested when I enquired. I sometimes had trouble getting an unobstructed view of the mostly large canvases, and I see that elsewhere in the museum they’ve made no effort to improve the signage since my last visit—wall lettering so small as to be mostly useless (and signs are much needed given the illogical, disconnected layout of the stairways). These complaints aside, I very much enjoyed seeing this close look at the influence of Matisse on the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

The exhibition begins with a timeline showing where and when the American artist had significant contact with Matisse’s work, both through visits to collections with important Matisse holdings and through reproductions (several display cases hold books about Matisse that Diebenkorn owned). The exhibition follows Diebenkorn’s career in broadly chronological fashion and thematically, starting with large abstractions from his Urbana period. A side room focuses on black and white drawings by the two artists. Many works by Diebenkorn are mounted beside works by Matisse that organizers and catalog editors Janet Bishop (SF MoMA Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture) and Katherine Rothkopf (Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, The Baltimore Museum of Art) believe were particularly important to Diebenkorn or that they believe show obvious influence. Matisse/Diebenkorn presents more than 100 works by the two painters from private collections, the estate of Richard Diebenkorn, museum collections all over the US, from museums in Paris and London, and other sources, including SF MoMA’s own holdings—in total, about 40 by Matisse, 60 by Diebenkorn. San Francisco is the second of only two locations that will host the show. Matisse/Diebenkorn was at The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 23, 2016 to January 29, 2017.

Matisse: Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916
The Phillips Collection

Richard Diebenkorn moved to Urbana, Illinois, in 1952 to take up a year-long teaching position there. He doesn’t appear to have liked the landscape much, but during his stay he produced some important large abstractions (these and the Berkeley-period pieces are among my personal favorites). The show includes Urbana No. 2, Urbana No. 4, Urbana No. 5, and Urbana No. 6 (all from 1953), pairing Urbana No. 4 with Matisse’s 1916 Studio, Quai St. Michel (shown above) and Urbana No. 6 with the French painter’s Goldfish and Palette (below). The show would be of interest just for the opportunity to see this group of Urbana paintings, but the pairings highlight similar color choices, a willingness to leave behind traces of process, and an approach to composition marked by an ever-present tension between opposing forces—tension between the abstract and the representational; between complex gestural areas suggesting motion on the one hand and static expanses of subtly modulated color on the other; between the linear and the un-delineated; between the patterned and the plain; between three-dimensionally rendered form and flatness.

This dialectical approach to composition (along with a distinctive use of color) is perhaps what most clearly makes Matisse recognizable, particularly in his highly experimental work of 1914–1916, and walking through the galleries I began to feel it may also have been the most fundamental lesson Diebenkorn learned from Matisse. Both painters were adept at creating a slightly disturbing ambiguity that generates the same feeling you get when looking at an optical illusion presenting two contradictory perspectives the brain struggles to reconcile. The real magic Matisse and Diebenkorn achieve, however, is in at the same time providing just enough solid ground to stand on that we aren’t compelled to turn away.

Matisse: Goldfish and Palette, 1916
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Goldfish and Palette is a good example of the ambiguity. It’s not at all clear what kind of space we're looking into here. The junction of the base of the blue trapezoid in the top half of the painting and the white in the bottom half suggests the meeting of a floor and a wall at the back of a room, two planes presumably meeting at a 90-degree angle, but the more-or-less centrally placed vertical black strip flattens the space—although not completely: the fine white lines on top of the black (both the two vertical lines above and apparently beyond the fishbowl and the less-assertive horizontal lines under the table-like surface that appears to support the fishbowl) argue again for a three-dimensional space (is that a door beyond the fishbowl?). The flat, supporting surface of the "table" grounds the fishbowl, but an interpretation of that surface as a table top is undermined by the incursion of blue at the left and by the black edge of the table-like plane doubling as part of what looks like a pattern on the blue wall beyond (which again flattens the space—if it is a wall; perhaps it is blue sky seen through a decorative balcony railing?). Thus, the “table top” apparently supports the fishbowl yet it threatens to fold down against the blue space at the same time, while, logically, it can’t do that because there appears to be a pair of legs under the table (or is it three?). The cross-like black lines in the upper right corner of the painting perhaps represent bars on a window, but, if there is a window there, the blue area must be a wall…and on and on.

Diebenkorn: Urbana No. 6, 1953
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 

Diebenkorn’s Urbana No. 6 may not be as directly indebted to Goldfish and Palette as the curators suggest, but Diebenkorn has used similar techniques to create ambiguity, even if the image is much more abstract than Matisse’s. In Urbana No. 6, we see a similar central black band, although here horizontal rather than vertical. In Diebenkorn’s painting it's this band of darkness that seems to create a flat, supporting surface; Diebenkorn’s black band functions like Matisse’s table top, supporting pale forms and red accents that suggest Matisse’s fish. The pale blue area in the upper right suggests a window, reinforcing the notion that the black area is in an interior space. The blue could also give the impression of looking through an open door at the far side of a room. In that case, the black band would seem more like a large carpet. But this is abstraction. I don’t mean to suggest one should struggle to interpret a work like Urbana No. 6 as representational. Yet the human brain inevitably interprets and Diebenkorn gives our brains just enough to keep us groping—following the example of Matisse.

Left: Matisse: Yellow Pottery from Provence, 1905, Baltimore Museum of Art
Right: Diebenkorn: Berkeley No. 47, 1955, SF MoMA

In pairing Diebenkorn's Berkeley No. 47 (1955) with Matisse's Yellow Pottery from Provence (1905), the curators look at how Diebenkorn experimented with unusual color combinations apparently inspired by Matisse. If Diebenkorn had Matisse's Yellow Pottery in mind when he painted Berkeley No. 47, he turned things on their side again, translating Matisse's representational color into horizontal bands of abstract color.

Throughout the exhibition, the color echoes are striking. Diebenkorn's Untitled, 1964, for example, showing a spray of flowers in a small blue bottle on a chestnut-colored table with a window beyond rendered in contrasting light and dark blues (not shown here) echoes the brown table and grey wallpaper (patterned in similar light and dark blues) in Matisse's Pansies (c. 1903, not shown). More generally, there's a range of blues in Diebenkorn that strongly echoes the blues Matisse favored. Following his autumn 1964 visit to the Soviet Union (now Russia) as part of a cultural exchange (where he toured the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow, both with large Matisse holdings), Diebenkorn made the paintings in his oeuvre most obviously indebted to Matisse. Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad from 1965 and Large Still Life from 1966 (below) use the characteristic Matisse blues, overtly decorative flourishes filling spaces that read as walls, and, again, spatial ambiguity. It's appropriate that Recollections adorns the catalog cover (top of this page).

The Matisse paintings Diebenkorn saw in the Soviet Union include some of the French painter's largest canvases. I was set to wondering if the monumental quality of Diebenkorn's large Ocean Park paintings was also inspired by Matisse. Diebenkorn started painting the Ocean Park series in 1967, returning to abstraction on a large scale and in earnest following a period of mostly figurative work not long after his return from the Soviet tour.

Diebenkorn: Large Still Life, 1966, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Drawings on display in a side room are instructive. Devoid of color, they make it easy to see Diebenkorn using some of Matisse's compositional tricks—in particular, the use of decorative patterns and the juxtaposition of flat and three-dimensional treatments. Matisse loved interlocking areas filled with patterns, sometimes suggestive of tiling. (It's tempting to think Matisse's 1912 and 1913 visits to Morocco inspired the habit, but he was already using this device before his trips to Africa.) The most striking example of influence among Diebenkorn's drawings is perhaps an untitled 1964 drawing in graphite and ink on paper showing a coffee cup, a plate, and silverware on a richly patterned tablecloth (below).

Diebenkorn: Untitled, 1964, Collection of Leslie A. Freely, New York

To illustrate the juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional treatments, the curators pair Matisse's Reclining Model with a Flowered Robe (c. 1923-1924, not shown here) with Diebenkorn's Untitled (Woman Seated in a Chair) of 1963 (not shown here), pointing out that Matisse depicted his figure with volume against a flat (again heavily patterned) background, while Diebenkorn used a patterned drape to flatten his figure against background elements handled three dimensionally. I thought Diebenkorn's 1962 Girl with Flowered Background among the paintings an even better example (below).

Diebenkorn: Girl with Flowered Background, 1962
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

The figure is simplified, but it is clearly three-dimensional. The knees protrude, the waist recedes. One hand is behind an elbow, the other is in front of the girl's face. There is shadow below her skirt and under her chin, and her forearm throws a shadow across her chest. She casts a blue shadow on the wall behind her. The background is completely flat, and Diebenkorn muddies the relationship between the girl and the background—and here he shows how completely he's absorbed Matisse's example. The red-tipped floral curve at the girl's left shoulder (on the right side of the painting) connects with the line of trim on her collar,  undermining her three-dimensionality. The way the "horizon" line behind her is broken by the blue shadow has a similar effect, as do the connections between the shadow and the blue line of her collar (this time at her right shoulder, on the left side of the painting) and the connection between that blue line and the darker linear element on the wall behind her, just above her shoulder. The effect is to make the red and blue trim of her collar appear part of the decoration on the wall behind her.

Left: Matisse: Seated Nude, Head on Arms, 1936, private collection
Right: Diebenkorn: Untitled (Seated Nude), 1966, SF MoMA

Also of interest were drawings by Diebenkorn that show substantial reworking (pentimenti), with heavy lines overlaid at the end to mark the artist's final decision about what ought to go where—a technique Matisse used in a number of his drawings. Shown above are the French artist's Seated Nude, Head on Arms from 1936 and Diebenkorn's Untitled (Seated Nude) of 1966.

I also thought it notable that one of the Matisse drawings had been augmented (made larger) with an additional strip of paper added at its top edge. A thumbtack hole is visible in each of the four corners of the original sheet. The artist appears to have run out of space and added the paper at the top, adapting his working space to the demands of a composition in progress. I mention this drawing in particular (Model Resting on Her Arm, 1936) because I have seen film of Diebenkorn working in this way, pasting strips of paper onto a piece in progress as the composition seemed to require. Again the influence of Matisse? (I saw the film at The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in 2015 in conjunction with a show of Diebenkorn's works on paper. The film shows Diebenkorn at work at Crown Point Press, in Oakland, collaborating with master printers Marcia Bartholme and Hidekatsu Takada, in 1986, photographed by Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press. A review of that show is here.)

Matisse: French Window at Colliure, 1914
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

The Matisse/Diebenkorn show is a pleasure to walk through because it is a lucid explication by example of the way Diebenkorn learned from Matisse, but it's worth a visit simply because it's a collection of very fine work by both artists and work that we don't often have a chance to see. While I am very familiar with the Ocean Park series, for example, I'd never before seen any of the very early pieces in person, and the SF MoMA show includes Ocean Park No. 6 (1968), Ocean Park No. 12 (1968), Ocean Park No. 27 (1970) and Ocean Park No. 29 (1970). The early numbers look distinctly awkward. You can see Diebenkorn here struggling to find something he hasn't quite figured out yet. By Ocean Park No. 54 (SF MoMA) Diebenkorn has found his stride again. In the mature Ocean Park paintings, Diebenkorn reflects Matisse mostly in his palette and in the use of large, subtly varied planes of pale color broken up by linear elements, mostly lines parallel to the edges of the picture plane or at 45 degrees to those lines (although often ever-so-sligtly askew). Diebenkorn has now completely absorbed Matisse and removed the referential entirely, but, if seen beside Matisse's most experimental work, even these paintings are not so far removed from Matisse as they may at first seem—paintings like French Window at Collioure, from 1914, shown above, or his Seated Pink Nude (below).

There's a lot to see. Matisse/Diebenkorn is a show that will bear more than one visit—perhaps even three.

Matisse: Seated Pink Nude, 1935-36
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

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Art I'm Looking At: Richard Diebenkorn's Notebooks at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

It's been a year of Diebenkorn in the Bay Area. Following a show of prints at the De Young in San Francisco and a show of works on paper at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in Sonoma, earlier in 2015, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford is hosting Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed, a show of 29 of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks, mostly a gift of Diebenkorn's widow, Phyllis. The sketchbooks are displayed publicly here for the first time. In conjunction with the show is a small exhibit celebrating the center's recent acquisition of an Edward Hopper painting from 1913 entitled New York Corner. The connection may not at first be obvious, but early in his career Diebenkorn was deeply influenced by Hopper.

I visited the Stanford campus recently to see both offerings. I had never been to the Cantor Arts Center, which has an extensive permanent collection that looks well worth exploring.

The sketchbooks contain more than 1,000 drawings that span Diebenkorn's career. He appears to have kept several sketchbooks going at once and to have used them randomly, so that looking at them from page to page doesn't provide a sense of development. Almost none of the pages is dated and the chronological order of the books itself appears to be unclear. Instead, we get a series of snapshots--some finished works, others the simplest outline of an idea. All but one of the sketchbooks are opened and housed in plexiglass cases, so only two facing pages are visible from each. One has been separated into individual leaves and hung in a rack that allows you to see the whole as if turning its pages.

All 29 sketchbooks have been digitized, however. Two large monitors in the gallery allow you to look at every drawing, as well as the various items Diebenkorn left tucked into their pages, and even the front and back covers of each book. The digital presentation is available online. Thus, the 29 sketchbooks can be browsed from home, although the pages are slow to load, even with a fast Internet connection.

The sketchbooks may not document a linear development of the artist's work, but they offer glimpses into his thinking. Most of the drawings are figure sketches--some from models, some sketches of friends and family—, but there are doodles that record ideas for later use, there are preparatory sketches for some of the large Ocean Park paintings, and there are abstract sketches that appear to be finished pieces. Of special interest are clusters of related sketches of models that allow us to see Diebenkorn making repeated attempts to capture a pose (as seen above).

The Hopper is worth seeing all on its own, but the galleries juxtapose New York Corner with early paintings by Diebenkorn that show a genius still unformed. They are, on the whole, not compelling works, but demonstrate that even the most highly regarded of artists has to start somewhere. I doubt contemporaries looking at these pieces would have predicted Diebenkorn's subsequent development.

The Hopper shows the influence of Impressionism, especially in the rendering of the distant cityscape at the left of the canvas and in the use of black (and here, indirectly, the influence of Japan). I particularly enjoy the way the little rectangle of white at the left of the clustered figures interacts dynamically with the white blocks at the far right. Despite the Impressionist influence, Hopper's signature style is already apparent. He was a master at using architecture and human figures to suggest the quiet, almost inaudible hum of distracted humanity.

Both the Diebenkorn and the Hopper exhibits were to have closed February 8, but have been extended to August 22, 2016. The Cantor Arts Center is at Stanford University (328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford, California). Free admission.

Art I'm Looking At: Diebenkorn Around the Bay Area (July 5, 2015)

We're privileged right now to have two shows of rarely seen work by Richard Diebenkorn on view simultaneously in the Bay Area, a show of prints at the De Young in San Francisco and a show of small-scale drawings, collages, and watercolors at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in the town of Sonoma, a venue that has only recently come to my attention--and that accidentally: I happened to come across a reference to the Sonoma show in one of three books published by Kelly's Cove Press in conjunction with the exhibition, which is subtitled "The Intimate Diebenkorn."

In keeping with that subtitle, the Sonoma show presents a selection of smaller works, the largest being no more than about 24 x 36 inches (most considerably smaller) in various media. None of the images was included in the large show of Diebenkorn's work in the summer and autumn of 2013 at the De Young Museum (Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years). Some Bay Area viewers may have seen the bulk of the Sonoma show at the College of Marin (September-November 2013) or San José State University (March-May 2014), but the selection of works now at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art has been augmented by about 12 pieces not included on earlier stops. The show next travels to the University of Montana (September-December 2015).

The De Young show of Diebenkorn prints highlights the museum's "latest significant acquisition of [Diebenkorn's] prints, made possible by the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions and the generosity of Phyllis Diebenkorn," the artist's late widow--to use the words of the introductory gallery panel. I believe the De Young Museum now has the largest collection of Diebenkorn's prints in the world aside from the collection of the Diebenkorn Foundation, from which the traveling show now in Sonoma has been assembled.

The Sonoma show provides an intimate overview of the various styles in which Diebenkorn worked. There is a good selection of representational work including still life subjects, nudes, and landscapes as well as abstract work, both in the fluid, organic style of the Berkeley and earlier periods and the more rarified, highly linear style best known from the large paintings of the later, Ocean Park period.

The works are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which allows a comparison of similar types of work from different periods, although it somewhat obscures Diebenkorn's journey from abstraction into figurative work and still life and then back to abstraction--part of what makes looking at the whole of his artistic career fascinating. Despite the diversity of subject matter, Diebenkorn was always concerned with formal compositional problems. An interior view of a posed model or a landscape was for Diebenkorn always as much about dividing up space on a flat plane as any abstraction was. The works as shown demonstrate both the breadth of his subjects and the compositional concerns that unite his work. The 1962 figure drawing in ballpoint pen shown here (above) is an excellent example--a highly economically rendered pair of nude figures but, at the same time, a composition consisting in large part of blank rectangular or squarish areas of paper separated by thin lines. The legs of the male figure at the left side of the page are particularly ambiguous. The 1958 untitled oil landscape on paper shown below likewise blurs the line between the abstract and the descriptive.

The Sonoma venue is divided into four areas: the main exhibition space, a permanent art library off to one side, a space at the front of the building where visitors are offered a place to play with paper and drawing tools if inspiration has hit them, and a darkened area behind a wall at the rear, where two videos about Diebenkorn run in a loop. One of these was made at the time of a major retrospective of the artist's work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 1977. The other shows Diebenkorn at work at Crown Point Press, in Oakland, collaborating with master printers Marcia Bartholme and Hidekatsu Takada, in 1986, photographed by Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press. The former is short (22 minutes) and interesting mainly because it shows Diebenkorn politely, somewhat shyly interacting with an adoring public at the opening reception for the Los Angeles exhibit. The latter video (35 minutes) is of greater interest and well worth the time it takes to watch. It offers a rare look at the artist in the studio, showing him proofing prints, working on copper plates, consulting with the printers about changes, and finally coming to decisions about finished versions of a number of pieces (one of which he ultimately decides to abandon after much frustration).

Diebenkorn's work process was interactive, restless, and experimental--involving interaction between the artist and his materials. Each new piece was a kind of conversation with the medium: an idea proposed, considered, approved of or rejected--the artist always listening and responding to the voice of the evolving work--the cycle beginning again, repeating until an equilibrium was achieved. It's a process especially well suited to collage, so it's not surprising that collage enters into many of the smaller works on display in Sonoma. Some of the drawings are on joined pieces of paper. One small abstract work from 1992, the year before his death (shown here), consists of pieces of what appears to be a drawing cut up and arranged on a second blank sheet (coincidentally, highly reminiscent of some of the work of Basque artist Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002)). The Crown Point Press video shows Diebenkorn cutting up proofs and pasting them together to rework a composition--essentially designing a print by collage.

The De Young Exhibit focuses on Diebenkorn as a printmaker. He seems to have been interested in printmaking of various types throughout his long career, and many of the last works he made--when ill health had made it impossible to tackle the large canvases he favored as a younger man--were prints. Most were etchings and drypoints, but the De Young show includes a fair number of lithographs and you get a sense looking at the early examples that he was testing the limits of what appears to have been a new medium for him at the time. Some of these early lithographs are essentially line  drawings in crayon, others look like puddled ink drawings. Later color lithographs from the 1980s are more mature, looking very much like Diebenkorn the painter. Again, the subject matter in the De Young exhibit is diverse, including figure studies, landscapes, still life subjects, and abstraction. Nearly all the pieces exude something essentially Diebenkorn despite that diversity.

The show at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (one half block from Sonoma’s historic Town Plaza: 551 Broadway, Sonoma CA 95476, (707) 939-7862) runs through August 23, 2015. The show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., San Francisco, CA 94118, (415) 750-3600) closes October 4, 2015.

Art I'm Looking At: Richard Diebenkorn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco (July 17, 2013)

After seeing the "Impressionists on the Water" show at the Legion of Honor, I went to see the Diebenkorn show now on at the DeYoung Museum—Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years (1953-1966).

Diebenkorn has long been among my favorite abstract painters. There's something about his work that resonates with me, but I realize I knew very little about his life or about the long arc of his career before seeing this show, which helped to educate me a little. For example, I was almost completely unaware of the figurative work he did during the middle of the period covered here. Judging from the paintings included, Diebenkorn focused briefly on figurative subjects mostly between about 1956 and 1958. These works are sandwiched between earlier, purely abstract works characterized by flat patches of color (often in pinks, ochre, and other fleshy tones) and later abstract work with a greater emphasis on line. It's the earlier abstract work (roughly between 1953 to 1955) that I enjoy most. It was a real pleasure to stand in a large room surrounded by about 15 large works from the early period. Berkeley No. 3 (1953, below) is typical.

Line is not absent as an element in these earlier paintings and some of them contain abstracted letters or appear to contain fragments of text, but the emphasis is on color, and most of the colored areas in the works are loosely defined, with blurry or ragged edges. Diebenkorn is said to have been strongly influenced by the Abstract Impressionists at this stage (especially by Willem de Koonig), and I've read comments suggesting he should himself be considered an Abstract Expressionist, but these paintings seem too quiet, too contemplative to be called Abstract Expressionist. They have none of the anger or nervousness I associate with that movement. There is no deliberate, explosive splattering of paint here, no frantic, nervous brushwork. Diebenkorn instead seems to have left us with records of inner conversations about color and form. I'm not the first to note that many of the works look like landscapes. There is very often a suggested horizon line. Although these may not have been intended as actual horizons, they serve to give the paintings a solidity despite the open washes of color. There is something very reminiscent of Cezanne in these paintings. Others in the show that incorporate decorative motifs clearly show an interest in Matisse. There are even a couple of large cut-out collages in the show that borrow technique as well as style from Matisse.

The figurative paintings seem less successful to me. It may simply be a matter of taste, but they don't speak to me the way the abstract paintings do. That said, it was interesting to see Diebenkorn's foray into an area of painting that was quite unfashionable at the time—a time when American abstraction was at the center of the Western art world. Perhaps it was conscious rebellion. Perhaps it felt too easy to paint the abstractions. I don't mean to suggest that abstraction is in any way easier than figurative art. In fact, I believe quite the contrary. The figurative artist at least has his subject in front of him as a point of reference. Painting in the abstract requires the subject itself to be conjured up out of thin air, although much that passes for abstract art is, in fact, referential. I mean simply that I think artists sometimes become suspicious of their own motives and the value of their work when they produce a great deal quickly, and Diebenkorn was certainly prolific during his early years in Berkeley. Perhaps he felt the need to step away from what he was doing so successfully at the time. It was during his first couple of years in Berkeley that he appears to have quite suddenly attracted a great deal of attention from the media. Coffee (1959) is typical of the figurative paintings. It's among those I like best, but the figurative work seems somehow less authentic, less the result of committed interest, the color less inspired—certainly less sensual. Still, it was very useful to see the many works from this period included in the show.    

After the flirtation with making large figurative paintings, the return to abstraction is marked by a somewhat more rigid, geometrical quality. Line becomes a much more central element. The paintings are almost cartographic. They look like aerial photographs of agricultural land broken up by the occasional line of trees along a river. They are less fluid than the earlier work. The last third of the show is mostly paintings in this more linear style, but interspersed throughout the show are figure drawings that Diebenkorn continued to make regardless of where his painting was going. Eventually the growing emphasis on line blossomed into the even more linear, straight-edged paintings with Ocean Park titles such as the one pictured here, which is in the De Young's permanent collection--Ocean Park 119 (1979).

I've never before seen so many of Diebenkorn's works collected together. It's not often that I immediately want to go back again to see a show I've just walked through, but I hope to visit the Diebenkorn show once more before it leaves the DeYoung. Well worth a visit—or two. There is much to see here. The show runs through September 29.