Rich hues and bold strokes flood the canvas of Berkeley #6, one of the first and most elegant paintings of Richard Diebenkorn’s major eponymous series. A preeminent figure of twentieth century American art, Diebenkorn diverged from his peers in the New York School to investigate his own contemporary expansion on the history of Modernism. Between 1953 and 1956, Diebenkorn devoted himself singularly to abstraction, creating an exclusive series of numbered Berkeley paintings that reflected a sustained admiration for European Modernism as well as a burgeoning interest in the American landscape. One of only nine Berkeley paintings produced in 1953—the first year of the series—the present work is amongst the very first examples of this pivotal group. Testifying to their singular importance, nineteen of the fifty-eight extant Berkeley paintings have been acquired by museums around the United States, including The Phillips collects ion, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum. A superlative example from Diebenkorn’s celebrated and widely exhibited series, Berkeley #6 has been featured in numerous major museum exhibitions, including the early survey Diebenkorn at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1960 and Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings 1943-1976 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1976-77, among others. Acquired by the Kislak family in 1982, the present work has been held in the family’s collects ion for almost four decades.
Berkeley Paintings in Important Museum collects ions
Through Diebenkorn’s poetic synthesis of vibrant colors, undulating lines, and varied textures emerges the essence of place. Despite the early effort of critics and historians to anchor Diebenkorn’s abstractions in the physical landscape of the American West, Diebenkorn insisted that his works are the product of “a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression.” (The artist quoted in: Timothy Anglin Burgard, “The Nature of Abstraction,” Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years 1953-1966, New Haven, 2013, p. 18) The sun-baked yellow, sandy pink, and azure blues of Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #6 elicit the visual impression of the colors and spirit that infused his personal environs in the American West.
“I’m not a landscape painter (at this t.mes , at any rate) or I would paint landscape directly.”
In 1951, Diebenkorn took his first day-t.mes civilian flight across the desert from Albuquerque to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Surveying the American landscape from an aerial perspective sparked a breakthrough for the artist. He remarked: “I guess it was the combination of desert and agriculture that really turned me on, because it has so many things I wanted in my paintings. Of course, the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’ —I mean…. It was all like a flat design—and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid.” (The artist quoted in Dan Hofstadter, “Profiles: Almost Free of the Mirror,” The New Yorker, September 7, 1987, p. 60) In the following years, Diebenkorn’s abstractions would come to evoke exactly that—the presence of “earth’s skin.”
Opting to paint inside his small railroad-side home, Diebenkorn ruminated on his flight above the American West and the ways in which it could inform his painting process. He recalled: “The aerial view showed me a rich variety of ways of treating a flat plane—like flattened mud or paint. Forms operating in shallow depth reveal a huge range of possibilities available to the painter.” (The artist quoted in: Timothy Anglin Burgard, “The Nature of Abstraction,” Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years 1953-1966, New Haven, 2013, p. 19) In Berkeley #6, the essence of rolling fields materializes through a thoughtful layering of paint on the canvas, prompting the viewer to contemplate the topography that inspired Diebenkorn’s experimentation. The golden yellow, rose-colored, cerulean, and vibrant green planes of the present work are cleaved by dark, musing lines, enveloping the viewer in an aerial vista. The painterly marks of Berkeley #6 create texture on the canvas’ surface, morphing into irregular planes that powerfully suggest the topography that inspired them. As curator Kyle Morris has explained, Diebenkorn’s “painting does not start with nature and arrive at paint, but on the contrary, starts with paint and arrives at nature.” (The artist quoted in: Timothy Anglin Burgard, “The Nature of Abstraction,” Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years 1953-1966, New Haven, 2013, p. 20)
As his contemporaries devoted themselves to the New York School, Diebenkorn instead turned his focus toward the masters of European Modernism. While at Stanford University, Diebenkorn had the opportunity to visit the collects ion of Sarah Stein, the widowed sister-in-law of renowned collects or Gertrude Stein; there, Diebenkorn encountered Matisse’s The Bay of Nice (1918), a tranquil and planar painting of an ocean vista, configured on an aerial perspective that would prove formative for him in the coming decade as he developed his own abstract compositions. The artist remembers: “Right there I made contact with Matisse, and it has just stuck with me all the way.” (The artist quoted in: Timothy Anglin Burgard, “The Nature of Abstraction,” Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years 1953-1966, New Haven, 2013, p. 14)
Along the undulating forms of Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #6 emerge the thick, flattening lines of Matisse that punctuate The Bay of Nice, while through the lyrical loops on the upper third of the canvas materializes the floating formations of Gorky’s drawings, which Diebenkorn encountered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simultaneously, in the sunflower yellow, blood orange, and chartreuse green strokes of the canvas appears the characteristic mark-making of Cézanne’s paintings in the collects ions of the major East Coast museums that Diebenkorn visited in the 1940s.
By 1957, the Berkeley series had already received national attention through art historian Herschel B. Chipp’s article for Art News. Detailing Diebenkorn’s practice, Chipp writes of the artist’s methodical approach: “The appearance of an initial image on his canvas is only the beginning of a lengthy series of appraisals, criticisms and modifications. The image is manipulated in various ways, expanded, contracted, reversed, and it undergoes drastic metamorphoses into altogether different forms, meanings and contexts. Thus an important aspect of his painting is its development.” (Herschel B. Chipp, “Diebenkorn Paints a Picture,” Art News, May 1957, p. 45). For Diebenkorn, the art-making process was not sporadic, but rather the product of thoughtful engagement with art history and repeated revision of his canvases. An especially poignant and visually captivating embodiment of Diebenkorn’s painterly oeuvre, Berkeley #6 is a singular masterwork from the earliest moment of one of Diebenkorn’s most pivotal periods.