Richard Diebenkorn

Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1956)
Chrysler Art Museum, Provincetown
Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Throughout Richard Diebenkorn’s oeuvre, even the artist’s most abstract compositions, the Ocean Park paintings, are grounded in landscape structure. In his figural and landscape paintings of the mid-1950s, such as Man Drawing, one can observe an affinity between the foreshortened space, luminous color tones, and vertical linear structure of these representational works and his later Ocean Park series. The inspiration for both styles originated in the artist’s move back to the Bay Area in 1953, where the open horizons of the Pacific, the hilly landscape, and the vibrant sunlight of Berkeley introduced a new chromatic mood into the artist’s palette. In paintings such as Man Drawing, sun-drenched yellows and greens contrast with sky blues and white expanses. Furthermore, Diebenkorn had utilized the compositional device of compressed space in earlier landscape series such as the Urbana and Berkeley paintings, but the vantage point of those works was an aerial view. With the introduction of figures in the mid-1950s and with the inspiration of his new surroundings, Diebenkorn’s more mature paintings achieve a mercurial balance of broad vista and interior intimacy. As in Man Drawing, Diebenkorn compressed the figure and the traces of a more confining interior into the lower frame of the painting, which ambiguously melds into a more open but equally compressed vista of grass and trees. The middle ground is occupied by a sharply pitched transitional zone of canted windows and white patio or pavement. If the representational imagery of figure and trees were to be removed from this composition, the diagonals and verticality of Man Drawing could easily be translated into the later abstract Ocean Park compositions of light and shadow, color and form.

In the early to mid-1950s, Diebenkorn’s abstract paintings were the subject of noted acclaim, culminating with the Berkeley abstractions exhibited at a successful one-man show at the Poindexter Gallery in New York in 1956. At this critical point, Diebenkorn made a decisive departure toward representational work. Dissatisfied with the lack of tension and boundaries that abstraction afforded, and impatient with the strong emotive impulse of New York Abstract Expressionism, Diebenkorn sought a form of expression that would allow him to renegotiate the aesthetic terms of his visual repertoire. By the time of the 1957 exhibition, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, curated by Paul Mills, Diebenkorn was a central figure in the return to representational art within the abstract aesthetic.  Included in this seminal exhibition, Man Drawing illuminates the artist’s statement that ``when I stopped abstract painting and started figurative painting it was as though a kind of constraint came in that was welcomed because I had felt that in the last of the abstract paintings around 1955, it was almost as though I could do too much, too easily. There was nothing hard to come up against. And suddenly, the figure painting furnished a lot of this.’’ (R. Diebenkorn interviewed by Gail Scott in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum, New Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, 1969, p. 6).

As Jane Livingstone noted in the catalogue to the 1998 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Diebenkorn observed a hierarchy within the lexicon of representation. ``The still-life object firmly anchored him in concrete reality; the observed landscape could be more freely interpreted; figure painting held the highest and most challenging set of psychological and methodological imperatives.’’ Livingstone further identified the ``arresting discrepancy between the quality of literal verisimilitude in the small [still-lifes] of humble objects and the somehow metaphoric, even allegorical, character of the more ambitiously scaled interiors, especially the interiors with figures.’’ Diebenkorn himself acknowledged the primacy of the figure as a catalyst in an undated studio note, stating ``The human image functions for me as a kind of key to the painting.’’ (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998, p, 50)

Expanding on this theme in 1987, Diebenkorn further commented, ``As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself – in a way that I welcomed. …In abstract painting one can’t deal with …an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn’t in the painting….And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be….in extreme conflict.’’ (Ibid., p. 50).  In dealing with the dichotomies of representation and modern concepts of spatial concern and painterly process, Henri Matisse was a constant inspiration for Diebenkorn. In The Piano Lesson (1916), Matisse’s genius for reductive geometry that implies just enough perspective to suggest interior space is fully in evidence. As in Man Drawing, the figure is relegated to the lower right quadrant of the canvas, flanked by a window to an exterior view. The interior space inhabited by the figure is ambiguous and planar. In the Piano Lesson, the glass window is canted open, not so much to imply depth as to provide a strong vertical element to the linear compositional structure, just as the canted planes of the floor-to-ceiling windows in Man Drawing compress into linear diagonals and verticals. Bold color planes provide a sense of illumination and immediacy to each scene, defying any sense of depth or shadow of traditional perspective. The boundaries between interior and exterior have dissolved, yet the dichotomy and tensions between representation and abstraction persist.