Inspired by Albuquerque: Diebenkorn’s Untitled, 1950
Richard Diebenkorn/Grey Art Gallery NYU
Excerpted from the Village Voice
The Abstract Desert
Recommendations
by R.C. Baker
February 19th, 2008 12:00 AM
For pure aesthetic pleasure, it’d be tough to top the 40 paintings and drawings that California artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) completed during a stint in New Mexico from 1950 to 1952. Already a skilled figurative artist, Diebenkorn was struggling to find a personal form of abstraction. In the late ’40s, he taught at the California School of Fine Arts, and one student remembers how the artist critiqued a drawing: “He was talking not about the form, but about the . . . line itself. I [then] realized there could be life in a line. It was one of the most profound things I ever learned.” The pupil went on to say, “All of this was done without words, just with agony and . . . croaks.” Soon after, Diebenkorn and his family settled into a caretaker’s cottage on an Albuquerque ranch, and the surrounding desert and livestock began to appear in his work as broad patches of warm color and lithe black squiggles. These pieces exude a hardscrabble light very different from the refined Matissean grandeur of Diebenkorn’s later, more famous Ocean Park abstractions of the shoreline near Santa Monica. In the New Mexico work, you get hints of the gritty orange planes of mesas and the stark shadows of deep arroyos. Spattery ink drawings compare well to what Philip Guston was exploring in New York; they also contain a vigor and humor that feels equal parts Miró and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip. (Diebenkorn loved the nimble background and color shifts that defined Coconino County’s surreal desert; he also once made quirky woodblock labels for his own home-brewed beer.) Though colorful 14-inch-high gouaches from his sketchbook use dynamic swatches of black to beat back a sense of actual landscape in favor of lively abstraction, those same contrasts convey a high and hard sun, while a smear of gray could be a distant rain squall. Diebenkorn was content to serve two masters, since they in turn served his purpose of achieving a distillation, rather than a depiction, of the world he observed. […More]
Maybe there is a longing to see some good abstract painting???
For me the key point in this review is the last sentence. “…distillation, rather than a depiction, of the world he observed.” The abstract work that I find most engaging and interesting, work that I return to again and again, uses objects, figures, landscapes, as a jumping off space. It is rooted in our visual and embodied experience of the world but is not concerned with creating some sort of an illusion. To compare with literature, it is more akin to poetry than non-fiction or fiction. Often times when paintings are not rooted in some visual or embodied reality they tend to lack structure and while they may be exciting to look at first impression, they are not as impactful over the long term.