Diebenkorn revisits Picasso (and others)

Last week I posted about how the "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" show now at the Phillips Collection reveals how Richard Diebenkorn worked his way through a number of modern masters on his way to becoming one of the greatest post-war painters. I focused on this 1951 Diebenkorn, a painting the NYT said has been exhibited only once in 32 years. I traced it back to Picasso's 1932 Still Life: Bust, Bowl and Palette. 

In 1952, just before leaving Albuquerque for a teaching job in Urbana, Ill., Diebenkorn made a second visit to that Picasso. This time he banished orange, the dominant color in the 1951 painting, from his palette. The first time around he had exaggerated the bust, this time he minimized it. Where at first he ignored the structure of the Picasso to play with components of the painting, to de Kooning-ize them with letters of the alphabet, this time he sublimated everything else to delineating Picasso's structure with clear, straight black lines. The two paintings -- frustratingly installed out of sight of each other at the Phillips -- are a fascinating revelation into how Diebenkorn worked through his forefathers. (I can't think of another example of Diebenkorn working through one painting in multiple paintings of his own. But if anyone else...)

There's one other painting in which Diebenkorn explores Picasso's artistic legacy: In 1951's Albuquerque (Motorcycle Wreck) Diebenkorn directly plays at mixing a cubist 'quote' with an abstract ground. The painting (at right) features one motorcycle wheel up against the picture plane, and one lying down, receding into the picture. It's almost as if the young artist was testing cubist flatness, seeing whether there was something there for him. (Answer: Not much.)

The New Mexico paintings are ripe for these kinds of readings. In a recent lecture at the Phillips, ex-MoMA chief curator John Elderfield drew similar specific links between New Mexico paintings and Gorkys, Miros, Rothkos and de Koonings. He also made a persuasive case for how the great St. Louis Art Museum New Mexico painting was informed by a Gottlieb.

So no, I don't think that "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" reveals that New Mexico seeped into Diebenkorn's art -- I think that Diebenkorn's time in graduate school allowed him two years of relative quiet during which he worked his way through the dominant painters of his time. And I think the show inadvertently explains Diebenkorn's frequent contention that critics read too much Matisse into his work: The show demonstrates that in his formative years Diebenkorn didn't think much about Matisse at all. (Of course, once he found him...)