Richard Diebenkorn

Knoedler and Company, New York
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1978

This work is in very good condition overall. There are artist's pinholes at the corners and there is a slight undulation to the sheet inherent to the artist's working method. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte intermittently along the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
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Richard Diebenkorn's vibrant and gridded drawing from 1977, Untitled exemplifies the artist's esteemed and widely recognizable Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967 and continued to revisit and develop over the next two decades. Though Diebenkorn's career began with figurative paintings and drawings, he moved toward abstraction after viewing the daring works by modern masters Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, and most notably Henri Matisse. Diebenkorn encountered Matisse's work firsthand during a retrospective at the UCLA Art Gallery in 1966. Matisse's masterpiece from 1914, View of Notre-Dame, particularly struck Diebenkorn; the landscape of Paris was reduced to converging geometric forms and sharp angular lines. Diebenkorn was able to translate Matisse's direct, simplified and immediate depiction of the famous landscape and make it relevant in 1977.

Only a year after seeing the UCLA show, Diebenkorn embarked on the Ocean Park series, which demonstrated a similar move toward abstraction through the construction and segmentation of space. Diebenkorn exalted his new abstract aesthetic, noting that "the abstract paintings permit an all-over light which wasn't possible for me in the representational works, which seem somehow dingy by comparison." (Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, The Ocean Park Seriew: Recent Work, New York, 1971, p. 11)

For Diebenkorn, drawing was always an essential part of his working process as it established the linear framework for the final composition, whether that be a drawing or painting. John Elderfield underscores the importance of drawing for Diebenkorn, "its importance is that of mortar between bricks, hardly noticeable at times, but what holds the structure together and keeps it firm." (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, New York, 1988, p. 11)

In the present work, Untitled from 1977, the off-white, almost sepia tone of the paper is segmented by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, creating a grid-like quality to the drawing. Indeed, Diebenkorn even used a ruler to create such precision in his composition. The unpainted areas that are created in the negative space between these channels distort the viewer's perception of "what reads as volume and what reads as space, what reads as full and what reads as empty" (Elderfield, p. 47). The lines shoot across the sheet in hues of blue, green, orange, red and white. The criss-crossing network of lines recall the roads and horizons of the California landscape that Diebenkorn so closely studied. He seems to handle the paint brush as he would a pencil - drawing a line and often going back to erase it with a thick white dab of gouache. On paper, these erasures become much more visible than they would on canvas and subsequently become part of the work's overall composition. Diebenkorn does not make an attempt to mask these areas; in fact, he highlights them, illuminating the artist's creative process.