L
ush, gestural brushstrokes are cohesively tied to a rigorously ordered composition in Richard Diebenkorn’s Untitled (Landscape). Diebenkorn, whose artistic production lingered on the periphery of Abstract Expressionism before emerging as a key figure in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, was influenced by his surrounding environment more than any other artist of his t.mes
. Considering himself a traditionalist, he welcomed identification as a landscape and figurative painter in an era when this was considered retrograde, and he reinvigorated his subject and chosen painterly medium by uniting formal, methodical draftsmanship with confident, expressive mark-making. The present work, a contemplative study of the western American landscape executed at a moment of experimentation and invention in Diebenkorn’s career, indicates a renegotiation of the aesthetic terms within his visual repertoire, and this gem-like sheet presents an aesthetic and conceptual linchpin within his practice.
Created during a brief period during the late 1950s when Diebenkorn returned to more representational work, Untitled (Landscape) reveals his simultaneous desire to celebrate the verdant and hilly California terrain while exploring the boundaries of non-objective painting. The bold, sweeping brushstrokes of lush green, cerulean blue, and golden yellow show vestiges of his preceding Berkeley paintings from 1953 - 1956, yet the strong horizontal and diagonal lines, and planes of layered color anticipate his most celebrated Ocean Park series yet to come. Throughout the 1950s, Diebenkorn integrated a formalist sense of pattern into his paintings, based on aerial views and multiple angles, establishing a signature visual language of perspectival frameworks. As noted by Jane Livingstone, "By 1955, Diebenkorn had thoroughly solidified everything he had learned about abstract painting and was extending his knowledge in a number of directions. In this period, which the artist himself later termed 'explosive,' he seemed capable both of new invention and sustained virtuosity," (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, 1997, p. 43). Fusing spatial and chromatic explorations, he created spontaneity in linear composition with a strong sense of structure, light, color and space.
“One thing I know has influenced me a lot is looking at landscape from the air… 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.”
Maintaining a fluid and balanced composition within the space of the rectangular plane yet suffused with the power of hue to lend the surface a luminous presence that extends well beyond the edges of the sheet, the present work brilliantly combines the formal with the emotional. Diebenkorn here brings together undulating topography with light and warmth in brilliant colorful abstraction. Untitled (Landscape) is not a representation of a site; rather it is a distillation of an environment inspired by the raw dynamism of California.
