Diebenkorn in New Mexico at the Phillips

Which means that the show of Albuquerque paintings on view now at the Phillips is an opportunity to see the work of the greatest American student of Matisse before he found Matisse. (The show was organized by curators Charles Lovell and Charles Strong for the Harwood Museum of Art. The Phillips is the last stop of a four-city tour.) "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" is a stunning, unexpected revelation, an opportunity to see Diebenkorn working through Miro, Gorky, de Kooning and, most surprising of all, a chance to watch Diebenkorn work through the greatest European synthesizer of Matisse: Pablo Picasso.

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 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 made 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. It's a painting that Picasso made in preparation for a major exhibition at Georges Petit, an exhibition that followed a 1931 Matisse show at the same gallery. The painting shows Picasso re-claiming a trope from Matisse, whose 1916 treatment of the same subject was featured in a popular magazine on the occasion of Matisse's show. (I wrote about these two paintings in February.)

Albuquerque No. 3 (1951) above is Diebenkorn's synthesization of the Picasso. As is evident time and time again in the Phillips show, Diebenkorn isn't directly abstracting the Picasso, he's letting the Picasso guide him. In essence; Picasso stole the painting's subject matter and 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. (Before seeing this show in San Jose last year, it had never occurred to me that Picasso had anything to do with Diebenkorn. The influence of Picasso on Diebenkorn is the shocker of the show.) 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 Marie-Therese Walter's 'personal 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.