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February 8, 2007
Pictures of Nothing: Monotheism
Remarkable: Richard Diebenkorn isn't even mentioned in Kirk Varnedoe's Pictures of Nothing. Diebekorn certainly wasn't the first American abstract painter, but for me he was the best. His absence from PoN was the biggest disappointment of Varnedoe's Mellon Lectures, and of the book, too.
The most obvious explanation is that Diebenkorn was a Californian, and as I've said earlier that means he was a likely candidate for exclusion right from the start. (At right is 1954's Berkeley No. 8.) But I have another idea: Maybe Varnedoe wasn't interested in artists who moved back and forth between representational and abstract painting. Here's Varnedoe:
I prefer to... insist on the constant cycling between representation and abstraction, between drawing forms out of the world and adding new forms to it. This is true neurologically, in the way that we perceive and interact with the world, and it is also true socially, in terms of abstraction's history: there has been a constant cycling between seeing and inventing, representing and abstracting.
This is from the beginning of chapter two, right after Varnedoe had discussed Jeff Koons' Rabbit, a work which mixes representation and abstraction. I think that when Varnedoe is writing about mixing ab and rep, he's talking about in one work, and not over a career.
I wonder: In his search for "the case for a logic of abstract art," in his pursuit to answer the questions "Does it work? What do we get out of it?", I wonder if Varnedoe worried that artists who vacillated between representation and abstraction lacked faith. The question I'd most like to ask Varnedoe is: Did artists who weren't monotheists weaken the case for the utility of abstraction?
Today on MAN I'll take a look at a number of artists not mentioned in Varnedoe's book who went back and forth between abstraction and representation in their careers. Tomorrow I'll post about a few artists who would seem to fit into the quote I blocked above, but still aren't in the book.
Posted February 8, 2007 8:48 AM
