Diebenkorn “Berkley Years” at the Palm Springs Museum – amazing paintings.
For a guy with such wicked shifts in subject the museum sure blended it all – maybe a little too fluid. Would have preferred more chronology in placement.
He had three distinct phases in the years 1953-67:
•He starts out, age 31, an abstract painter.
•In ’56 he switches to painterly figuration.
•In ’64 he sees Matisses in Russia and flattens out the pictures, definitely a predecessor to his Ocean Park series which he started in ’67 when he left Berkly for SoCal.
The early abstract paintings he ends up saying “oh, I guess they WERE landscapes after all” but they are quite distinct form his Berkeley landscapes.
The show points out that Rothko and Still taught him and it wouldn’t be to much a stretch to say his abstractions combined the bulbous blurs of 1940s Rothkos with the stark color areas of Still.
Interesting to think that Pollock is ten years older than him on the other side of the country and is struggling with how to get out of the trap of the all over abstraction in the same year that Diebenkorn starts painting his pencils and ashtrays while Jackson just gets in his car and drives into oblivion.
I know some old guys in the art world and, reminiscing, they all call him Dick Diebenkorn. It was another time.
He had one of the great boozer cauliflower red noses and smoked even after heart surgery, died a month before his 71st birthday, that is how that generation rolled. He was an artist in WW2, secretly landed in Japan and sketched it for the army on preparation of an invasion. The bomb rendered those sketches useless. I wonder if they adorn some CIA mess hall at a listening station near Okinawa to this day…
The ’56-’63 landscapes, figures and still lifes that were his figurative phase differ from the abstractions not just in subject matter.
These are austere paintings that pull back on improvisation to let the colors grab you. And it isn’t really the colors themselves as much as the interplay of the colors. In this he truly synthesizes Rothko and Still but needs to ground the work in figuration to make the chroma symphony sing.
After ’64 the pictures flatten. The passages of color are larger swatches, standing more on their own. He is slowly hitting his stride. Matisse has corralled Still and Rothko and flattened The Dieb’s compositions and loosened up his color.
His last painting in Berkeley comes at the dawn of the Summer of Lover – it is of a seated woman and the direction he is going – towards Ocean Park in Southern California – is already apparent.
We know how the story goes from there – he paints the most significant abstract paintings of the late 20th century. His BERKELEY YEARS were a great warmup…