Crocker Art Museum
A traveling exhibit premiering at the Crocker Art Museum explores Diebenkorn’s early years
A traveling exhibit premiering at the Crocker Art Museum explores Diebenkorn’s early years
Through January 7
In 1936, when he was 14, Richard Diebenkorn’s grandmother, Florence Stephens, took him to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to see a traveling retrospective exhibition of the work ofvincent van Gogh. Twelve years later, he would have his first one man show at the Legion of Honor.
His grandmother was supportive of his talent, giving him art books as well as a set of 88 postcards depicting the entire 230-footlong Bayeux Tapestry created in the 1070s and depicting the events leading up to the Norman Conquest in 1066. Diebenkorn (1922-1993) was fascinated by the horizontal bands of its composition, a device that would show up in his works repeatedly over the years.
When Andrea Liguori, managing director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, was completing the Diebenkorn catalogue raisonné, she talked with Scott Shields, associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, about putting together a Diebenkorn exhibition. Shields became fascinated by the artist’s early work, before the better known
figurative work from the mid-’50s and his later abstract expressionist work. “Though his evolution was rapid, he did not suddenly arrive on the scene as an Abstract Expressionist prodigy,” Shields says.“he investigated many styles and ideas to get there.”
Ligouri notes,“the variety in the artist’s output, and its response to the forces that influenced him in his art making, invited a much closer look.we hadn’t yet seen a museum exhibition of Diebenkorn’s work preceding 1950, and with the catalogue raisonné providing the public with the first complete look at the early productions, Scott instantly recognized its importance and was eager to explore it more deeply.”
The artist’s many styles and ideas are presented in the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 at the Crocker through January 7.
The museum explains,“focused exclusively on paintings and drawings made between 1942 and 1955, Beginnings features 100 works from the collection of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, most of which have never before been publicly exhibited.these little-known works range from World War II drawings and watercolors of soldiers and military bases, to abstractions that unite the forms of Surrealism and the fractured planes of Cubism, to gestural works on paper.the show concludes with one of the artist’s first mature figurative paintings, his 1954 Untitled (Horse and Rider), laying the foundation for
the representational drawings and paintings soon to come (1955–1966).”
Untitled (Horse and Rider) harkens back to the horsemen he saw in the postcards of the Bayeux Tapestry and its three horizontal compositional bands.
In 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco on the GI Bill and worked with artists including Elmer Bischoff, Ed Corbett, Frank Lobdell, David Park and Hassel Smith. He received a grant to study in Newyork and when he returned to CSFA (now the Santa Fe Art Institute), he became an instructor. In 1947, Clyfford Still joined the faculty and Mark Rothko was a visiting lecturer.
Shields notes,“diebenkorn learned from Clyfford Still that painting must not be pretty and from David Park that it should not be easy to make. Diebenkorn came to relish the search and struggle, making them critical components of his art and battling against his innate predisposition toward the refined, gracious and elegant, creating a tension he exploited to maximum advantage.”
After the Crocker, Beginnings will travel to the Owsley Museum at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. In 2019, the exhibition will be on view at the Frederick R.weisman Museum of Art; Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland.