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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Richard Diebenkorn
catalogue raisonné of paintings and drawings being prepared by the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.
Untitled, 1957 captures Richard Diebenkorn's candid vision and artistic evolution. From an important series of paintings executed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Untitled anticipates the "Ocean Park" series, which would materialize ten years later.
Having established his reputation as an abstract painter, culminating with his enthusiastically received "Berkeley Series" in 1956 at the Poindexter Gallery in New York, Diebenkorn's sudden shift to the representational mode was shocking for many. As the artist explains, "I can remember that when I stopped abstract painting and started figure painting it was as though a kind of constraint came in that was welcomed because I had felt that in the last of the abstract paintings around '55, it was almost as though I could do too much, too easily. There was nothing hard to come up against. And suddenly the figure painting furnished a lot of this" (quoted in G. Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, New York, 1987, p, 88-89).
In fact, Diebenkorn's purposeful pursuit of this new artistic challenge manifests in the present picture's tension between abstraction and representation. He retains the strong abstract character, and mystery and physical opacity that characterized his earlier abstract paintings, but also employs a new artistic vocabulary: a rigorous geometry of composition, a bold and sumptuous application of paint, an upward tilt in perspective, and a severe cropping of the picture plane. Diebenkorn's new challenges of representation yields in Untitled, 1957, in what he articulated that same year, "I think what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve--tension beneath calm"; moreover the painting foreshadows what would materialize as the artist's most celebrated paintings a decade later (quoted in J. Livingston, ed., The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 46).
catalogue raisonné of paintings and drawings being prepared by the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.
Untitled, 1957 captures Richard Diebenkorn's candid vision and artistic evolution. From an important series of paintings executed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Untitled anticipates the "Ocean Park" series, which would materialize ten years later.
Having established his reputation as an abstract painter, culminating with his enthusiastically received "Berkeley Series" in 1956 at the Poindexter Gallery in New York, Diebenkorn's sudden shift to the representational mode was shocking for many. As the artist explains, "I can remember that when I stopped abstract painting and started figure painting it was as though a kind of constraint came in that was welcomed because I had felt that in the last of the abstract paintings around '55, it was almost as though I could do too much, too easily. There was nothing hard to come up against. And suddenly the figure painting furnished a lot of this" (quoted in G. Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, New York, 1987, p, 88-89).
In fact, Diebenkorn's purposeful pursuit of this new artistic challenge manifests in the present picture's tension between abstraction and representation. He retains the strong abstract character, and mystery and physical opacity that characterized his earlier abstract paintings, but also employs a new artistic vocabulary: a rigorous geometry of composition, a bold and sumptuous application of paint, an upward tilt in perspective, and a severe cropping of the picture plane. Diebenkorn's new challenges of representation yields in Untitled, 1957, in what he articulated that same year, "I think what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve--tension beneath calm"; moreover the painting foreshadows what would materialize as the artist's most celebrated paintings a decade later (quoted in J. Livingston, ed., The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 46).