Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn painted this Cityscape in 1963 in oil on canvas at 60.25 x 50.5 inches.  Recently there was an ad in an art magazine about a new publication of the Ocean Park Series and while this particular painting is not of that series I felt compelled to write about it for a little bit.

Initially references to Edward Hopper are present in the painting by the strong commitment to natural light and local color.  You could say that Diebenkorn dispenses with some of the pleasantries of a Hopper by allowing paint to be paint.  While the painting works in terms of perspective, a relatively high horizon line within the composition makes the painting function on an abstract level.  Broken colors within the shadows functionally describe pregnant spaces while allowing the medium some expressive qualities.  Similarities with Fairfield Porter and De Kooning can be seen in this respect, a liberation from the arduous polish of traditional painting.  There is a wonderful neutrality in a painting like this between the influence of the “image” and the power of the “paint”.   This painting has always stood out as a middle ground between representation and abstraction where you can effectively read the process of it’s construction.  This of course becomes the artist manifest.

Paintings can be viewed in a variety of ways.  Someone may take from this picture a “Cityscape” that is a little abstract, but recognizable enough to warrant appreciation for things like light and perspective.  Another may see this as a field of study in terms of language and creative problem solving i.e. broken spots of color that communicate the dry grass fields without literally mixing down these transitions.  There is merit in both ways of looking at this work, and often both are equally considered.  It is always interesting though when painting becomes a game of chess.  The organization of pictorial elements and technical flourishes communicate that this is not simply a genre painter, but a conscious individual who has reached a point in their career that they can fall back on their painting foundation and assemble an image that is unique and personal while remaining formally challenging.  There is a trend in a lot of contemporary painting to essentially pick and choose technical devices used by another artist in order to create the allure of sophistication, like some sort of formula.  If you look hard enough you can see through these empty “ghost paintings” that merely imitate an effect rather than take the time to explore the language of painting genuinely.  At the risk of sounding like an elitist, spend time and understand what was going on in the world of painting during the beginning and middle of the last century and use that knowledge to look critically at the art of today.  Diebenkorn is someone worth looking at and he could be a gateway into more abstract works if that is something not all that interesting to the viewer.