Lot Essay
Beginning in 1956, Diebenkorn turned away from the abstract style in which he had been painting since the early 1940's and favored representational subjects. For Diebenkorn, whose artistic maturity began in abstraction, this change represented a step forward as opposed to a return to tradition, in that it provided him an opportunity to solve different problems in his art. Diebenkorn has explained that he was never particularly interested in the transcendental, but that for him art had to deal with some aspect of the concrete.
This gouache from 1956 beautifully combines Diebenkorn's early abstract style with his emerging experiments with representational subjects. He portrays the figure as a landscape, simply suggesting features and body parts that could easily be natural elements. It is also notable that Diebenkorn forgoes the use of line here; intead, the color spreads to fill space and broad brushstrokes create volume.
Diebenkorn often acknowledged the influence of Czanne and Matisse on his work, and in particular Matisse's interpretation of Czanne. Structure and self-contained unity within a work were his primary goals. Diebenkorn's models usually look down or away, partly because "[he] does not want to make psychological contact with the face. He wants us to grasp the meaning of a work from the whole composition and not have it filtered through the personality of the model." (J. Elderfield, The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988, p. 22)
This gouache from 1956 beautifully combines Diebenkorn's early abstract style with his emerging experiments with representational subjects. He portrays the figure as a landscape, simply suggesting features and body parts that could easily be natural elements. It is also notable that Diebenkorn forgoes the use of line here; intead, the color spreads to fill space and broad brushstrokes create volume.
Diebenkorn often acknowledged the influence of Czanne and Matisse on his work, and in particular Matisse's interpretation of Czanne. Structure and self-contained unity within a work were his primary goals. Diebenkorn's models usually look down or away, partly because "[he] does not want to make psychological contact with the face. He wants us to grasp the meaning of a work from the whole composition and not have it filtered through the personality of the model." (J. Elderfield, The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988, p. 22)