Richard Diebenkorn: Between Heaven and Earth

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The work of American painter Richard Diebenkorn has been much imitated but you don’t know it till you have seen the real thing. British art lovers now have their chance at the Royal Academy

The last time the art of American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–93) was exhibited in Britain was in a 1991 show in Whitechapel Art Gallery – enough time for a generation of artists and gallery-goers to have grown up without experiencing his art first hand. There are very few of Diebenkorn’s major paintings on this side of the Atlantic but the peculiar thing is that much of the art now on display at the Royal Academy (closes 7 June 2015) will seem familiar to viewers encountering it even for the first time.

Diebenkorn started studying art in California at a time (in the 1940s) when there was little top-class modern art to be seen in public collections. His education was completed by visiting museums on the East Coast. Throughout his work, the influences of Matisse   and Bonnard  are apparent. Americans Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning   and Edward Hopper   also appealed to Diebenkorn. He began as a committed proponent of Abstract Expressionism,   picking up the style just behind New York School painters. The early abstracts are characterized by their broad palette of intense colour, vigorous brushwork and forms with irregular outlines.

Diebenkorn’s art can be handily discussed in reference to the place where it was produced, using the following periods: San Francisco, Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, Berkeley, Santa Monica and, finally, Healdsburg. The Berkeley period is the only one in which figurative work predominates. The Santa Monica period is dominated by the Ocean Park series. The divisions are useful but also deceptive, as Diebenkorn sometimes worked on figurative and abstract work at the same time and was often thinking in terms of both. 

It has been pointed out how aerial photographs inspired forms and layouts of compositions throughout Diebenkorn’s career, starting during the war years when the artist worked in reconnaissance photography. Even the eye-catching purple in Albuquerque #4 (1951) is derived from aerial photographs Diebenkorn took. The experience of viewing the landscape from above as a patchwork of different colours played a large part in Diebenkorn’s understanding of landscape and in his aesthetic. Viewing his pictures, one gets the impression that (like the artist) we are hovering over a surface not standing on it. As so often in Diebenkorn’s art, we are in neither heaven or on earth and we likewise exist in a space that is neither naturalistic nor abstract. This is typical of Diebenkorn’s art.

Having studied with a group of artists who came to be called the (San Francisco) Bay Area School,   the young Diebenkorn lived for short periods away from the Californian coast. In 1953 he moved to Berkeley (adjacent to San Francisco) and he found that his colleagues had abandoned Abstract Expressionism and had begun painting figuratively. Having an ambivalent attitude towards abstraction, Diebenkorn attended a private life-drawing group with Elmer Bischoff, David Park and others. (His life studies are extremely accomplished and are satisfying as complete artistic statements.)  Life-drawing studies and the examples of trusted colleagues helped Diebenkorn to escape the ‘straitjacket’ of Abstract Expressionism. In 1955 Diebenkorn reintroduced the figure and identifiable landscape motifs. For the next decade, recognizable imagery would dominate his art. For some, Diebenkorn’s move was considered repudiation of abstraction, which his critics saw as a regressive step.

During the ‘50s and ‘60s, Diebenkorn’s figures are often large and in the foreground of compositions, with architecture and landscape nearly abstract in their lack of specific detail. His portraits of specific (though unnamed) sitters are very simplified. However large the faces or busts get, and however close to the picture plane they become, the faces all have the same lack of detail. The display includes a selection of small still-lifes – single objects seen close up and painted at life size or slightly larger. Though the comparison has been drawn with Diebenkorn’s and Manet’s   still-lifes, a better association would be with the early still-lifes of Cézanne.   The use of palette knife also links Diebenkorn to both Cézanne and Courbet.

One of the outstanding pieces in the exhibition is Cityscape #1 (1963). We look down a road in the raking light of a sunny afternoon, buildings to the left, fields to the right. The swooping effect of the road diminishing in one-point perspective and the bird’s-eye view gives a palpable dynamism to the composition. The lush colours and generous brushwork gives it a richly tactile quality. It is one of the defining images of California and the most memorable and pleasurable American landscape since the best of Hopper’s.

The Berkeley period paintings have great originality, force and confidence. They are amply freighted with figural motifs and purely formal components and techniques. They also have an emotional complexity and plangency that enriched Diebenkorn’s artistic range. One leaves the room feeling that there was another 20 years’ worth of work to be done in this fertile intersection and puzzled at Diebenkorn’s decision to devote the rest of his career to abstraction. 

After moving to Santa Monica and (largely) ceasing to paint figuratively, Diebenkorn produced a group of abstracts featuring rectilinear grids, bands and blocks of muted colours and broadly curving lines, executed in oil wash and charcoal. This is the Ocean Park series. For critical supporters of abstraction, the series marks Diebenkorn’s major achievement. Viewers of this exhibition may reach different conclusions. The series as a whole suffers from being a rather disappointing viewing experience. There is little of the exuberance and improvization present in the early abstracts. The colours are muted and while the harmonies are sometimes pleasurable they lack memorability. Surfaces are rather flat because the dilute paint dried very matt. The best of the series are lovely miniatures painted and collaged onto cigar-box lids, which attain a physical presence and concision that the large variants lack. 

Diebenkorn’s figure paintings will seem familiar because we have been exposed to it second-hand through the medium of inferior imitators working in the last few decades. None of them have the American’s acute sensibility and technical facility. Britons are fortunate to be able to experience the originator’s work first hand now. If you can visit London, enjoy it while it while you can.