Problem Solving
Van Dorenwaxter highlights Diebenkorn’s works on paper
Van Doren Waxter in New York is presenting Richard Diebenkorn:works on Paper, 1955 – 1967 through January 20.
This period marks Diebenkorn’s move to figurative work. His early work is featured in the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, through January 7. In her catalogue essay for thevan Doren Waxter exhibition, Rachel Federman writes,“it has often been said that Richard Diebenkorn courted awkwardness in his representational works in order to subvert—and, in the process, to transcend—his skill as a draftsman and painter…[the] artist regularly spoke of ‘that kind of fitness that the picture wants to have.’ For all the visible signs of process—erased or partially erased lines revealing compositional possibilities or even entire figures pursued and discarded— he once told an interviewer,‘pictures that aren’t done embarrass me.’ Recalling the Abstract Expressionist orthodoxy that had overtaken the California School of Fine Arts…in the late 1940s, he noted critically the lack of ‘equivocation’ and ‘problem solving’ in the ‘very spontaneous and very loose’ work that some produced there. In order to surrender control, one must be in possession of it in the first place.”
Federman is assistant curator of modern and contemporary drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York.