In the summer of 1952, just after completing a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico, Richard Diebenkorn made a quick swing through California. He stopped in the Bay Area to drop off some paintings, and in Los Angeles to see the landmark Alfred Barr-curated Matisse show at the Municipal Art Gallery. Diebenkorn had seen some Matisse before — notably at the Phillips Collection when Diebenkorn was stationed in the Washington area during World War II — but it was through that show that Diebenkorn first truly absorbed Matisse. There’s little sign of Matisse in any of Diebenkorn’s pre-1952 work.
The exhibition reveals that Diebenkorn was far less influenced by New Mexico’s mountain topopgraphy and desert colors than is generally believed. (The show’s curators grope for this explanation at every turn, both in the show’s frustratingly thin catalogue and especially in the broken-records masquerading as wall-texts.) From 1950-52 Diebenkorn wasn’t so much directly abstracting landscape, light, or anything else we typically associate with Western artists. He took specific paintings and techniques from favorite artists, and then built his own Esperanto out of them.
The most thrilling examples stem from Diebenkorn’s apparent study of Picasso’s Still Life: Bust, Bowl, and Palette, from 1931-32, a painting Picasso made in preparation for a major exhibition at Galerie Georges Petit. Picasso’s Petit exhibition has become famous for following — and responding to — a 1931 Matisse show at the same gallery. The Picasso painting Diebenkorn used shows Picasso re-claiming a trope from Matisse, whose 1916 treatment of the same subject was featured in a popular art magazine on the occasion of Matisse’s show — and then studied by Picasso. (I wrote about these two paintings in February.)
Albuquerque No. 3 (1951, above left) is Diebenkorn’s processing of the Picasso. As is evident time and time again in the Phillips show, Diebenkorn isn’t directly abstracting the Picasso, he’s letting Picasso guide him. Picasso stole the painting’s subject matter and its elements from Matisse, and Diebenkorn stole structure and shape from Picasso. The bust in the upper-right of the Diebenkorn is an obvious crib from the Picasso. In a nod to de Kooning (highlighted by John Elderfield in a recent Phillips lecture), Diebenkorn used letters to abstract other elements: The fruit bowl becomes an ‘O,’ the palette and hook is echoed in a scribbled ‘e’ or ‘l’. [The de Kooning, Zurich (1947) is now in the Hirshhorn’s collection and is on view now.] At the place in the Picasso where a tablecloth folds over itself forming 3/4 of an ‘X,’ Diebenkorn finds an ‘X’ in de Kooning, seems to like it, and inserts it in almost the same place in his painting.
But the hallmark of these paintings isn’t just direct inspiration, it’s more subtle appropriation, including the way Diebenkorn allows Picasso to influence his palette. In numerous paintings from this period Diebenkorn uses little patches of a strange faint purple, a color that hadn’t been in his palette before and that wouldn’t much be again. It’s a color that has nothing to do with New Mexico’s desert landscape, either. I posit that it’s a color he took from his study of early 1930s Picasso: That lavender-purple is Picasso’s Marie-Therese Walter color. It’s in gouaches from the Albuquerque period, in the great, Albuquerque No. 4 (1951), and it slides into the best painting Diebenkorn made in New Mexico, an amazing untitled 1952 abstraction.
In a catalogue essay Mark Lavatelli writes: “What comes out of the Albuquerque period — the multiple uses of line, the abstracted landscape quality — continues in the Urbana, Berkeley, and Ocean Park series.” Lavatelli is right to a point: Diebenkorn learned how to abstract away from subject matter in Albuquerque, but he wasn’t abstracting away from landscape. He was working from modern masters.
No. 3 isn’t Diebenkorn’s only consideration of Bust, Bowl and Palette. Tomorrow: A 1952 painting in which Diebenkorn goes back to Bust, Bowl and Palette in order to use Picasso’s structure.
