Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Arts

March 14 to June 7, 2015
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London, +44 20 7300 8000

The Royal Academy’s Richard Diebenkorn show operates on the basis that if he is known at all in Britain — and the publicity for and reviews of the show tended to assume that he isn’t — then it’s for his late Ocean Park series, named for the studio in which it was produced, as with all of his serial work. Accordingly, curator Sarah C. Bancroft sets out to challenge that narrow view by stressing the historical and geographic narrative. In three rooms, Diebenkorn’s work moves from an early abstract phase in room 1 (with paintings made in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, between 1950 and ‘56), to a surprising figurative turn in room 2 (Berkeley, 1956-66), to the Ocean Park paintings in room 3 (Santa Monica, 1967-88). The show has 20, 25 and 15 works from those three periods, respectively, including drawings from each, and five of the 145 large Ocean Park paintings.

Ahead of the Royal Academy’s efforts, then, Diebenkorn’s British reputation lay mainly with painters rather than the general public, so it made sense to take six well-established painters to the show and seek their opinions on it. They split pretty much 50-50, with Michael Stubbs, DJ Simpson and Katrina Blannin persuaded of the importance of at least the Santa Monica years, but Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger and Dolly Thompsett finding little to praise in Diebenkorn’s oeuvre.

There was some criticism of the show’s hanging. Simpson felt that the crowded early rooms left far too little space between paintings. Carr agreed, finding that the experience became “colorful, rather than about color” — as it wasn’t optically possible to isolate the color relationships within a given painting from those of its neighbouring paintings. The third room did give somewhat more space to the work, but the Sackler Rooms on the Royal Academy’s third floor have no natural light, and everyone felt that Ocean Park paintings would have benefited greatly from that.

Looking at the first room, Stubbs emphasised the historical context: the paintings were “typical of the early ‘50s in developing a Cubist space into more fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously construct and contradict the space.” Affinities were noted with English painters in the ’50s: Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, and Ivon Hitchens. Niederberger, too, felt that that Diebenkorn’s paintings are very much of their time, making them harder to access today in a way she saw as problematic. A venerable question arose: how did Diebenkorn know that a work was finished? Stubbs felt little judgement was in evidence, suggesting he appeared to, “throw everything at the picture until he decided to throw in the towel as well.”

Simpson was more persuaded by Diebenkorn’s instincts. Quoting one-liner summaries of the instinctual decisions involved, he thought the artist had judged “when there’s enough push and not enough pull,” or when he’d achieved “the right kind of wrongness.” Simpson liked the oddity in Diebenkorn’s colors, and how certain areas – for example, the purple in Urbana #6 — take on the status of objects within the pictorial field. He also liked the variation between dry-looking and comparatively lush application of paint.

Diebenkorn never prepared the ground with sketches. ”A premeditated scheme or system is out of the question,” he said. Rather, all the action can be seen in the paintings. That means they are heavily layered — though the layers are thin. The artists agreed that many early works could be read as aerial landscapes — or sometimes interiors — even though their primary qualities are abstract. They also agreed that Diebenkorn appeared to operate by addition only, with some scratching into the surface, but no scraping off of layers. Indeed, one of Diebenkorn’s own rules (from his list of ten “Notes to myself on beginning a painting”) was that “Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”

I rather liked a group of charcoal life drawings, which Diebenkorn started to produce in the mid-‘50s at Wednesday evening sessions with his friends David Park and Elmer Bischoff, and which marked the beginning of his move towards explicit representation. True, the debts to Matisse are undeniable, but they have a relaxed intimacy, and integrate the figures convincingly into their architectural settings in a way which links to the frequent presence of windows in the figurative paintings, and to the architectonic character of the abstractions to come. Yet the artists were unimpressed, seeing them as routine implementation of commonly taught approaches, including the treatment of backgrounds.

In fact, none of the painters rated the middle period highly, but their reasons varied. The painters whose own practice is most abstract tended to be the most sympathetic. Simpson and Stubbs thought that some of the paintings succeeded, but that they were too imitative of Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard. Thompsett felt the diaristic still lifes were less successful than similar painters, such as William Nicolson. The doubters complained that Diebenkorn failed to generate any psychological charge, and that, while there were abstract aspects present, they weren’t interesting in this period. Thompsett provided a partial exception: one mid-period painting, Seawall (1957), was the only one she really connected to in the whole survey. Here, Thompsett felt, “Diebenkorn had generated the language of sensation,” whereas elsewhere, she concluded, “he lacks a soul.” Seawall aside, she couldn’t grasp what he wanted to communicate, what drove him to make art.

Did Diebenkorn emerge as a strong colorist in the late work? Thompsett was unimpressed by their pastel tendencies, finding them “chalky” and too keen to be pretty. Seeing Diebenkorn’s “structure of horizontals and verticals with a relatively desaturated color palette,” Carr said she “couldn’t help wanting them to have the kind of rigorousness and sensitivity that Agnes Martin’s paintings do. She uses color in a very optically active way. His intention with color seems to be entirely descriptive of place or mood.“ Blannin, on the other hand, loved the way she could see that “saturated colors have been diluted by milky washes.” She emerged as the great enthusiast for the late work, admiring Diebenkorn’s ability to achieve his effects on the reduced scale of cigar box lids as well as in the seven-foot-high canvases — with which she said she’d be keen to live, perhaps the diagonal energies of Ocean Park #27 (1970) and the aqueous calm of #116 (1979) .

Diebenkorn denied any representational element, but the Ocean Park series does retain an aerial and window-like feel, which reads across from the earlier abstractions, consistent with their production in a studio overlooking the sea from a high vantage point. Continuity or not, Stubbs thought there was justice in the greater fame of the late work, in which he felt Diebenkorn was “more confident with the edges of forms and with variations between soft and hard edges.” If so, this may be what Diebenkorn got out of the move into and out of figuration: it gave him objects with which to establish his approach to color boundaries in a more natural way, which then carried over into his later abstract work.

I was reminded that Tom Wesselman explained his desire to paint figuratively against the background of Abstract Expressionism as a desire for “definite elements to manipulate in a very specific and literal framework.” That sentiment fits with Stubbs’s appreciation of the Ocean Park series: the geometry gave something for the gestural brushwork to play against,. In contrast, Carr found “his divisions, edges and pauses slack.” She liked Berkeley #57 (1955) for its “honesty and humility,” but was less attracted to the “confidence” Stubbs had identified in the later work. Niederberger was unenthusiastic about all phases, even though she said she’d been impressed by Diebenkorn when she was a student. Now she condemned the work as merely “nice to look at,” asserting that, while Diebenkorn operated well at the aesthetic level, he didn’t engage the brain. If Diebenkorn does engage the brain, I think it’s through the way he solves the formal problems that allow his work to appeal to the eye: we can follow him thinking his way through a composition, and see how he applies his Notes to myself, such as “attempt what is not certain” or “be careful only in a perverse way.”

That seemed to be at the core of Stubbs’s appreciation. He felt that the vehicle of the grid gave the later Diebenkorn “a way to contain his expressive gestures and the interesting and radical awkwardness of his colors successfully.” Blannin thought this “sophisticated,” even though you can see the signs of struggle. Simpson agreed, suggesting that Diebenkorn had found an approach which was quiet, not because he lacked energy or desire, but because he was “unegotistical.” “The coolness is not impersonal,” Simpson opined, “even though it avoids big, heavy, self-aggrandising gestures.” Stubbs agreed that Diebenkorn had desire, “even if it was very cool,” though he conceded that he was “more impressed than moved” by the results.

Maybe that absence of emotional impact relates to Diebenkorn’s contented and straightforward personal life, which provided him with none of the dark materials of such predecessors as Gorky, Rothko and Pollock. I liked a drawing from 1971, in which strategic pentimenti and the dialogue between ruled and freehand lines works well. Moreover, drawing directly onto the canvas with paint is fundamental to the Ocean Park series, and John Elderfield has suggested that Diebenkorn’s drawing is “what holds a structure together and keeps its firm.”

A gap emerged, then, between enthusiasts of the late work and those who thought it merely safe and tasteful, even if it embraced an artful messiness . Thompsett felt that Mondrian — an obvious influence behind the Ocean Park series — succeeded better because his approach was much tighter. Yet it was precisely the tension between tight and loose that appealed to the Ocean Park advocates. Moreover, as Blannin pointed out, Mondrian himself developed his frameworks instinctively, and up close his paintings are alive with brushwork that is far from neutral.

Do Diebenkorn’s paintings have “personality”? Perhaps of places rather than of people, was the view – even when he is depicting people, as they tend not to be individuated as characters. Indeed, one could argue that a small depiction of scissors is more of a portrait than the mid-period works featuring people, who seem present mainly for their abstract qualities. All the same, it was agreed, the personality of the painter comes through, even if it is through choice of color and structure, rather than gesture. The late work, I felt, is monumental yet intimate.

Overall, then, the mixed verdict showed at least that there’s enough variety and interest in Diebenkorn’s work to generate differing opinions. That itself suggests the work has virtues, even if they are hard to pin down given the somewhat subjective nature of the judgements involved — and all six artists said they’d enjoyed their visit, even if the substance beyond that enjoyment could be called into question.

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March 22 to May 30, 2014
2540 Barrett Avenue
Richmond, California, 510-620-6772

We value connections to the past, and the Breakfast Group, a loose affiliation of Berkeley-based artists, sustains a conversation that extends back more than fifty years – a living connection to ancestral figures of the Bay Area movement. There’s a certain look to that art, exemplified most prominently by David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, but its specific program is hard to define; perhaps that’s why the conversations have continued so long. This show brings together thirty-one artists currently affiliated with the group, and the works themselves, diverse as they are, engage in dialogue, suggesting that enough common ground persists to merit examination.

The Breakfast Group officially traces its origin to regular Friday lunches that painter Elmer Bischoff arranged with his Berkeley colleague Sid Gordin in the 1960s. These, however, merely extended the weekly drawing sessions and conversations that Bischoff held with Diebenkorn and others, before Diebenkorn left the area, when Fridays were a day off from teaching, and life centered around the campus and their nearby studios. When lunch took too much time out of the workday, meetings shifted to breakfast, at 7 am, and the group expanded to include William Theophilus Brown, Erle Loran, Hassel Smith and other artists teaching at Berkeley.

The group developed spontaneously, with no particular artistic agenda beyond a mutual interest in what people had to say.  As it enlarged, eventually to include women, the group moved from one restaurant to another, as establishments closed or their proprietors grew impatient with people sitting so long over coffee.

Bischoff and Loran were cosmopolitan, commenting on art in New York and Europe, but also discussing teaching, new art materials or local politics. Boundaries were fluid – artists like Sid Gordin made both painting and sculpture; gestural forms coexisted with Cubist geometry, along with an undercurrent of Surrealist improvisation. Distinctions between abstraction and representation, while vigorously debated, were not enforced with the same theoretical rigor that Clement Greenberg established back East, and Bischoff’s own work moved from the figure into abstraction during the 1970s.

For Bischoff, breakfast discussions didn’t extend to studio visits; he encouraged debate but kept a more general focus.  When group exhibitions inevitably took place – most notably at the Weigand Gallery in Belmont (1987) and at Holy Names College in Oakland (1991) – they offered a chance to celebrate the group’s diversity, and to examine the networks of artistic affiliations that emerged, like the submerged root system of a tree. So it is with the current show: more diverse than ever, the group can consider how it’s grown and how its present configuration reflects the passage of time. Members seem mildly surprised at how big it’s become and how long it’s been going, fueled simply by interest in one another’s conversation; aware of the history of artists’ groups in Paris cafes and New York automats, they wonder if something significant may have transpired.

Shows have also become reminders of artists no longer with the group – the 1990s were marked by Bischoff’s death in 1991 and Loran’s in 1999, and Jerry Carlin, the member with longest standing in the current group, passed away shortly before this exhibition was installed. Appropriately enough, his two works from the 1980s featured here are transcriptions in oils of old family photographs, which he endows with touches of color and personal inflections that bring their subjects back to life. They exemplify the mixing of media and interest in painterly depiction that inspired both the Bay Area Figurative Movement and other Bay Area artists such as Jess.

For many members, affiliation with the Breakfast Group involves allegiance to the Bay Area tradition that mixes figuration and abstraction. Terry St. John, now perhaps the senior member of the group, continues to create densely worked landscapes and figures, extending the legacy of Bischoff and Diebenkorn. His somber landscapes here suggest the depth of experience that informs his immediate response to a site. Lin Fischer goes further in her response to underlying impulses in her landscape-based abstractions, while Donna Fenstermaker creates more succinct plein-air studies that focus on shadows and reflections.

Interchanges with Europe and New York are integral to Bay Area art, dating back to Erle Loran’s inviting Hans Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in the 1930s. The German artist subsequently settled in New York, where his fusion of color with Cubism informed the rise of Abstract Expressionism. His visits to Berkeley, followed by a donation of money and paintings in the 1960s, enhanced ongoing interactions with New York. Here, Tom Schultz’s restlessly shifting rectangles evoke Hofmann’s grid-like compositions, while Arthur Monroe, another New York transplant, brings the gestural energy of Kline and de Kooning to his overall abstractions. A similar tension animates the drawing of Katie Hawkinson’s tightly compressed ellipses.

Abstract Expressionist impulses also emerge in sculpture, in the bronzes and stacked stones of Patricia Bengston-Jones. Her hand-worked slabs with their markings and suggestions of archaic structures hark back to an era before Minimalism and the “death of the object” upstaged such traditional forms. Joe Slusky’s animated armatures of painted steel and the assemblages of Stan Huncilman also exude a playful, improvisatory energy. Kati Casida abstracts gestural forces into origami-like shapes of aluminum, and that expressionist energy carries over into Marvin Lipovsky’s free-flowing sculptures in seductively colored glass.

Dialogues with New York can be complicated; Sandy Walker’s hybrids of figure and landscape, spare and edgy, speak directly to Bay Area art but originate in his exposure to Hans Hofmann’s legacy at the Studio School in New York. And Foad Satterfield owes the inspiration for his dense, overall landscapes, which amplify the scale and ambition of his Bay Area predecessors’, to his study in Louisiana with New York painter Paul Georges; Georges rejected Abstract Expressionism in favor of work from nature, but instilled in students the energy and ambition of the New York School.

Some women in the group have developed more individualized approaches. Nancy Genn and Edythe Bresnahan, who absorbed Berkeley’s varied influences as students, take them in more contemplative directions, composing with architectural structures on richly layered material surfaces. They share a concern for planar luminosity with Carol Ladewig’s color calendars, whose gridded panels chart the phases of the moon, and with Carl Worth’s hard-edge abstractions.

New technology has filtered into some works, but they remain grounded in individual sensibility. Jeanette Bokhour’s digital prints transform and enhance photos of Marvin Lipovsky’s colored glass sculptures, while those of P.G. Meier dissect and reconfigure everyday objects like pens or forks. Kim Thoman goes a step further by digitally “applying” her abstract paintings onto virtual vessels; she presents them here as large prints, although she is prepared to build them with a 3d printer. In more traditional engagements with high-resolution images, John Friedman photographs Nevada’s arid wastes in the manner of New Topographics, while British artist Anthony Holdsworth paints landscapes on site with a detailed realism reminiscent of his countryman, Rackstraw Downes.

Other works take a post-modern stance, but with personal inflections. Byron Spicer links older Bay Area art to the contemporary media era with his appropriated photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger, rendered in dense mosaics of one-inch square paintings. Genn Toffey’s portraits of historic women overlaid with transparent candy wrappers share in the subtle luminosity of Loren Rehbock’s delicate watercolor renderings of models on patterned backgrounds, which reflect his experience in poster design. The cut metal sculptures of Bruce Chaban recall Frank Stella’s compositions, albeit on a more intimate and playful scale, while Guillermo Pulido’s mixed-media constructions with chairs combine playful formal composition with graphic images of political conflict, reminding us of this important component of Berkeley’s culture.

Organization of this show was spearheaded by Jan Wurm, whose paintings blend Bay Area figuration with simplified renderings of men and women against flat backgrounds, which highlight social interactions, with details of clothing and mannerisms that lend them an ethnographic dimension. Difficult to categorize, they exemplify the combination of high sophistication and improvisatory play that characterizes the Bay Area scene, as do Robert Simons’ hand-painted prints, evocative of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Barbara Hazard’s idiosyncratic self-portraits from a mirror cube, which feature animals and multiple self-images in a contemporary version of folk art.

Such is a snapshot of the Breakfast Group today – or Groups, since it is currently split in a dispute between members who prefer Cafe Leila and those faithful to the Vault, a longstanding hang-out, where they maintain an earlier meeting time. The value of conversation and shared information still sustains the expanded group, even as other forces conspire against it. Cuts in education and higher rents have fostered dispersion (Terry St. John offered me comments via Skype from Thailand, where he now maintains a studio for much of the year); artists now commute to teach all over the Bay Area, and few can afford studios close to Berkeley. This has made it more difficult to recruit younger members. A sense of changing demographics and new trends in art lends this event a particularly retrospective and reflective character.

Given the richness of the show, there’s a sense that the gallery system should offer more opportunities for these artists to exhibit; there too, however, rising rents and the invasion of high-tech corporations have created an unfavorable climate. At least for now, weekly breakfasts continue, enacting a cultural form that can be transported and recreated in new locations. Celebration of the Breakfast Group at the Richmond Art Center continues through May, featuring weekly spotlights on selected members accompanied by potluck breakfasts, artist’s talks and workshops.

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October 12 to November 30, 2011
18 East 79th Street (between Madison and Fifth avenues)
New York City, (212) 734-6300

Every visitor to the great display of Willem de Kooning at MoMA is aware of the extreme difficulty of understanding his development. Acquavella’s magnificent show of Georges Braque, presented on two floors of a grand Upper East Side townhouse, poses the same question about an earlier modernist. How and why, one wants to know, does an artist who develops one style very successfully suddenly abandon it and move on? There are three Braques in this exhibition: the early fauve master (1906-1907); the cubist who was Pablo Picasso’s collaborator (1907- 1914); and the senior figure who, after that relationship was dissolved by the Great War, developed a highly distinctive late style (1917-1956), which openly borrows from but looks surprisingly different from classical cubism.

Change is difficult, as every psychoanalyst will tell you, because most neurotics cling to miserably dysfunctional lives. How much more difficult, then, to understand how Braque, who at each stage of his artistic career was marvelously triumphant, twice abandoned his style to move on. The intense colors of  L’Estaque (1906) are given up in Harbor (1909), which reconstructs a beach scene in  monochromatic brown and gray planes. (Houses at L’Estaque (1907) shows that transition in progress.) The austere Analytic Cubist The Mantlepiece (1912) is very unlike The Pantry (1920), in which Braque opens up his picture space. In the later art we remain indoors, he never returns to the landscape; a distinctive dark palette, not however restricted to blacks, grays and whites emerges. And in The Billiard Table (1944-52) cubist denial of perspective and a post-cubist palette  present a distinctive new motif.

Usually Braque is taken to be a lesser artist than Picasso. Once their collaboration dissolved, while the Spaniard moved rapidly through Neo-classicism, Surrealism and highly personal erotic images, before finding his late style, often based upon appropriations from the old masters, the Frenchman’s career was more modest. If no John Richardson has been inspired to tell Braque’s story that perhaps is because there is less to tell. The ‘flesh-colored’ cock forming part of the woman’s body in Woman with a Mandolin (1937) is as visually daring as Picasso’s erotic inventions, but how different is the studio setting, whose colors might come from early Vuillard. Mostly, however, Braque avoids Picasso’s explicitly autobiographical concerns

This exemplary show, which retells an important part of the now historically distant era of French modernism, speaks eloquently to the present. Not, I hasten to add, with reference to the pictorial concerns of cubism itself: That visual culture is now distant. But what remains of living interest is Braque’s ability to radically develop, in ways that do not simply cancel and preserve his prior manner. When Frank Stella works in series, he works through all of the variations on a motif, which he then abandons. Robert Mangold, by contrast, develops his motifs in a more intuitive way. And after the early Abstract Expressionist abstractions, Richard Diebenkorn turned to figurative painting before embarking on the Ocean Parks. Braque’s very different, arguably more radical development is even harder to rationally reconstruct. In the 1980s, some most distinguished scholars proposed to eliminate ‘style’ from our vocabulary. This exhibition shows that you cannot understand Braque without stylistic analysis. Since Stella’s, Mangold’s, and Diebenkorn’s magnificent ways of developing now reveal their period style, maybe some daring young artist will find her inspiration in this exhibition.

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