All artwork by Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993). Berkeley #22, 1954, oil on canvas. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. All artwork images copyright 2013 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. All rights reserved.
Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966, on view at San Francisco's de Young Museum through September 29, presents Diebenkorn's drawings and paintings produced when he lived in Berkeley. Featuring varied works that are both abstract and representational, the Berkeley period yielded a visual autobiography of Northern California.
Early abstractions were named for places Diebenkorn lived (Albuquerque, Sausalito and Berkeley, above image) and evoke their specific environments, although he often stated that the paintings did not have landscape associations. "It's really the name of the place rather than the place itself. What I paint often seems to pertain to landscape but I try to avoid any rationalization of this either in my painting, or in later thinking about it. I'm not a landscape painter (at this time, at any rate) or I would paint landscape directly."
He continually reworked a painting to discover an image, retaining traces of alterations, subtractions and superimpositions. Canvases are treated as fields extending to the edges, not organized in terms of figure-ground relationships.
Berkeley #44, 1955, oil on canvas, private collection.
An aerial perspective appears in Diebenkorn's paintings, influenced by airplane flights. Views from the airplane window offered a variety of ways to compress three-dimensional objects within the two-dimensional picture plane. Forms suggesting vegetation, hilltops, valleys, water reservoirs, and horizontal strata are reconfigured in shallow depth. Berkeley was an indirect influence in many of the works. "I don't know of any artist who was more responsive to his physical environment than Richard," says artist William Brice. "If he moves down the block, it changes everything. He absorbed the aura of a place."
Rose Mandel, Richard Diebenkorn, 1956. Digital scan from original negative. Copyright Rose Mandel Archive, all rights reserved.
Seawall, 1957, oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Around 1955 his artistic style began to shift toward figuration. "I was never throwing things away when I switched from one way of painting to another," says Diebenkorn. "You can see a continuum from abstraction to representation, although, I must say, it never felt like a smooth transition while I was in the middle of it." What followed was the second phase of his Berkeley period, in which he developed a unique realism which incorporated figure studies, still lifes and interiors. Landscapes served as nature studies.
Cityscape 1 (Landscape 1), 1963, oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Diebenkorn composed geometrically sectioned cityscapes that required him to reevaluate his gestural painting. A complex range of shapes and textures take into account qualities of light and shadow observed in nature. His outdoor scenes have a sense of atmospheric openness.
Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965, oil on canvas, private collection.
Matisse, Cézanne and Mondrian are referenced in the paintings of the early 1960s, especially Matisse's use of pattern, flat shapes and lush color--Diebenkorn was an inventive colorist. These paintings define the final chapter of the figurative work of his Berkeley period, while continuing to include the responses to light, color and atmosphere found in his earlier canvases. His evolving stylistic language and remarkably diverse oeuvre during this brief 13-year time span reveal abstraction and representation as coequal artistic options rather than either/or choices.
On view at the de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco.
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