richard diebenkorn
figure drawings
at acquavella
by Richard Stephens
Before the West Coast painter Richard
Diebenkorn perfected his famous "Ocean
Park" series of color abstractions, he
spent a decade creating richly worked and
brilliantly colored representational
paintings--still lifes, landscapes,
interiors and figure compositions. He also
drew from the model, and a selection of
these black-and-white drawings of women,
dating from 1958-67, were recently
presented in an exhibition at Acquavella,
April 26 - May 23, 1996.
These drawings have an eloquent presence,
largely due to Diebenkorn's understated
portrayal of the mood and character of his
models. Uniformly untitled, many of the
drawings depict the artist's wife Phyllis.
In Diebenkorn's paintings of people, almost
always women, the face is never explicit,
never important. His figure paintings were
not painted from life but were based on
drawings and reworked repeatedly until the
artist achieved the formal integrity of
color and structure he was seeking. The
figure drawings, on the other hand, show
the artist's apparently inexhaustible
interest in, and pleasure in, the presence
of flesh-and-blood women.
Two drawings have Matisse-like blank ovals
instead of faces and are obviously homages
to Matisse. The remaining 58 drawings
evoke, through the model's facial features,
gestures and pose, a human and specifically
feminine presence. This is not to say that
the poses and settings are at all natural.
Rather, the drawings are meticulously
arranged. Each model, whether clothed or
nude, makes with her limbs or garments the
sort of diagonal lines and angular shapes
with which Diebenkorn constructs his
compositions. The femininity of his subject
is not expressed by means of traditional
lines, but through the artist's responsive
rendering of the individual, feminine
personality.
The drawings' charm derives not just from
the personalities of their subjects, but
also from the artist's personality,
imminent in his marking gestures.
Diebenkorn manages to suggest space in even
his sparest drawings, while at the same
time maintaining the flatness of the
picture plane through compositional
structure. In the more densely worked
examples, those with either ink wash or
scribbled hatching done with charcoal,
pencil or pen and ink, lush half-tones are
achieved, giving a painterly effect. This
wonderfully varied scribbling technique,
borrowed perhaps from Bonnard, but employed
with more gusto by Diebenkorn, gives an
airy sparkle to the half-tone areas.
These drawings have a similarity to
portraits by Whistler and to both portraits
and nudes by Modigliani. Both artists were
devoted to the demands of portraiture and
were at the same time intensely involved
with abstract composition. The only profile
in the exhibition, catalog number 29, a
seated woman facing left, resembles
Whistler's Arrangement in Black and Gray,
with its rectangle to the left which serves
to balance through dynamic symmetry the
"arrangement."
The wide range of treatments of a narrowly
defined subject matter should give no
surprise coming as they do from the hand of
the artist who invented those masterly
variations on a theme that make up the
"Ocean Park" series.
Richard Stephens is a free-lance art writer
who is preparing a book on J.M.W. Turner.
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