RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Richard Diebenkorn

This is a summary of the article by Olivia Lang about Richard Diebenkorn entitled ‘Lovely imperfection’ which was published in The Guardian newspaper dated 28 February 2015.

A retrospective exhibition ‘Richard Diebenkorn’ will be held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 14 March 2015 to 7 June 2015. 

Richard Diebenkorn

Diebenkorn was ‘one of the greatest and most doggedly independent American painters of the 20^th century’.  He is ‘practically unknown in the UK’.  He was ‘both a figurative and an abstract painter’; he ‘captured tension beneath the calm’.

A photograph taken in 1959 shows Diebenkorn in his studio in Berkeley, California.  At this time Diebenkorn was moving from abstract expressionism to becoming a figurative painter.  In the mid 1960s he returned to abstraction. 

Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922, and soon moved to San Francisco.  He drew from a young age, inspired by postcards of the Bayeux Tapestry: in adult life he valued the three horizontal bands within the tapestry which together provide parallel narratives and he drew on this concept in his abstract works.

In 1943 he joined the Marine Corps.  Whilst stationed in Virginia during training, Diebenkorn took advantage of the opportunity to visit museums: he was impressed by the Impressionists and by Cezanne, Bonnard and Matisse.

In 1945 Diebenkorn was assigned to cartographic work.  He was frustrated that the printing equipment that was provided was inadequate: ‘blots and bubbles’ too frequently impaired the maps.  This seems to have inspired Diebenkorn in his later use of an aerial view for landscapes and the inclusion of ‘errors and mistakes’. 

In the early 1950s Diebenkorn studied for an MA at the University of New Mexico, whilst living with his wife and children in Albuquerque.  His paintings at this time show the New Mexico landscape ‘without quite reconciling into concrete forms’.

The dominant abstract painters at this time were based on the east coast of the USA: de Kooning was Diebenkorn’s favourite; figurative painting had been firmly rejected.

When Diebenkorn moved from abstraction to figurative work from 1954 onwards, his figurative paintings retained his ‘extraordinarily expressive way of handling paint’.  At this time Diebenkorn was living in Berkeley, California: his works are ‘distinctly Californian’ and evocative of Hopper’s early paintings.  Like Hopper, Diebenkorn agonised over the process of realising the artist’s original vision on the canvas.  Diebenkorn was particularly concerned about ‘easy perfection’: he wanted the finished figurative work to show the struggle by which it was achieved; traces of pentimenti were to be left in situ as evidence of this.  In Diebenkorn’s figurative work there are large areas which Diebenkorn referred to as ‘crudities’: relics of the tentative, accidental and imperfect method of achieving the finished work.

When Diebenkorn moved to Santa Monica in 1966 he abandoned figurative painting and returned to abstraction, despite the fact that abstraction at this time was being supplanted by Pop Art which was took a figurative approach.  Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series of paintings began to be produced at this time, and he continued to paint in this series until he died in 1993.