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Richard Diebenkorn Untitled, 1949 oil on canvas 48 x 41 in. The problem was to give the whole rectangle presence. There were some fairly good pictures in the Legion show. I hadn't gotten everything together yet, but by 1949 things did start to come together.1 Richard Diebenkorn Richard Diebenkorn was early recognized as an important figure on both the East and West Coasts of the United States, beginning with his first solo museum exhibition in 1948 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. This was a formidable time for the young artist, who quickly assimilated the lessons of early modernists like Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse. While reading Clement Greenberg's art criticism, Diebenkorn was also looking at the work of Clifford Still and Mark Rothko, visiting professors at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Diebenkorn taught. During this time, he belonged to a circle of California artists that included David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Hassel Smith, who were also experimenting with an abstract idiom.2 The late 1940s marks the Sausalito period of Diebenkorn's first abstract style. The paintings of 1949, in particular, are distinctly mature as the artist consciously abandoned the illusion of three-dimensional space for an integrated, all-over composition. In the Pattons’ untitled painting, one can see Diebenkorn working through the resolution of figure to ground relationships. Here, a calligraphic, yellow line defines a peninsular-like form above the center of the composition, which is composed of flat, broad planes of warm and cool colors. Diebenkorn expresses the creative tension between line and color that suggests simultaneously a deliberate and spontaneous application of paint. This freedom of gesture recalls the improvisational Jazz music that he began listening to at this time. The Pattons’ painting must have resonated with special meaning for the artist, who gave it as a gift to his friend and colleague, Elmer Bischoff. Diebenkorn's early and later abstract paintings, including the Ocean Park series of the late 1960s, celebrate the landscape of open spaces. Diebenkorn himself admitted, "Temperamentally, I have always been a landscape painter."3 Although twenty years separate the two bodies of work, there are similarities in the atmospheric quality that evokes the light of nature, the lines that energize expansive fields of color and the flow of the artist's brushstroke that records the process of creating a harmoniously, unified vision. Barbara Matilsky |