Richard Diebenkorn / Abstract Expressionism

Richard Diebenkorn and Abstract Expressionism

Richard Diebenkorn started to study art when he was at the Stanford University in San Fransisce and did representational paintings and drawings. Being an artist was never an idea of his parents although his grandmother was an artist and gave him inspiration. While he served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943 until 1945 Diebenkorn visited collections of early modern art in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. His influences came from Picasso, Hopper, Cezanne, Miro, Gorky, Rothko, Still, Baziotes, Motherwell and especially Motisse. He was introduced to a movement later to be called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and did his first abstract paintings around this time. In 1946, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, where his talent was quickly recognized. After two years of teaching at the school he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of New Mexico. Around mid 1950s he became identified as an abstract expressionist painter.

· 1948-1955 His abstract work period

· 1955-1967 Representational work period

He restarted his abstract paintings when he moved to Santa Monica in 1967, which were different to abstract paintings he did in 1940s to the early 50s. They were large-scaled abstract compositions of landscape he was living at the time, possibly the view from his studio. The series is called Ocean Park Canvases.

The movement ‘Abstract Expressionism’ came into the light in America when Richard Diebenkorn was working. It was promoted by an art critic Clement Greenberg. As he said “The purely plastic or abstract qualities of the work of art are the only ones that count.” he praised works of Abstract Expressionists such as de Koonings and Pollock. As one of the movement’s principles he said “…not skill, training, or anything else having to do with execution or performance, but conception alone.” He explained that the era was moved away from the pictorial art.

He also explained about one of the characteristics of the movement; “The picture no longer divided itself into shapes or even patches, but into zones and areas and fields of colour.” And as for colour he said “It no longer fills in or specifies an area or even plane, but speaks for itself by dissolving all definiteness of shape and distance.”, and “….it has also to be uniform in hue, with only the subtlest variations of value if any at all, and spread over an absolutely, not merely relatively, large area.”

His explanation in Abstract Expressionism doesn’t quite all apply to Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Canvases as the series is composed with geometric shapes but the colours are not dissolving together. Each shape is filled in with different colours and rather making a harmony by being placed together, like a completed zig-zaw puzzle. However, the colours Diebenkorn used are grey-like blue, pale pink, pale yellow and pale white, and these colours do apply to one of the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism as Greenberg said that colour had to be “warm colour, or cool colour infused with warmth.”

Expressing an artist’s emotion is the core principle of the movement, and I find it hard to find a strong emotion in Diebenkorn Ocean Park series. The series seems to reflect a calm feeling, and not much impact as if it was created over the artist’s strong mentality.

R.G. Collingwood(1889-1943) published “The Principles of Art” in 1938 and is best known for his work in philosophical aesthetics. His theory about expression in art is explained as “…what artist is trying to do is to express a given emotion.” And Collingwood applied ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ along this theory. ‘Bad art’ he explained “is an activity in which the agent tried to express a given emotion, but fails.” ‘Good art’ is the successful attempt to become conscious of given emotion, it means that an artist has to be aware of that he or she is expressing his or her emotion into some sort of ideas. Let’s say this Theory can apply to Diebenkorn’s paintings, then I have to say that this is a bad art. I cannot relate to his emotion on this series of work unfortunately. I might feel differently if I see them in a gallery, but as far as I look at them now I find it difficult to say what sort of emotional state he was in. However, it might be a different story to other people. Others would pick up the artist’s emotion quite well and say this is a good art. So the theory doesn’t apply the same to everyone. I first felt that Collingwood’s theory was quite reasonable as I knew that art was about telling people what you are thinking/saying/believing. But I disagree to define art as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There are many artwork, I think, which pretend to be ‘bad art’ but actually telling us opposite by deliberately giving negative images. So this ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ theory of Collingwood’s has weakness. I can only assume as I am not quite able to analyze what emotion exactly Diebenkorn was converting into the Ocean Park Canvases. It seems to me that he had a strong emotional connection to the ocean itself, and probably was projecting his emotion to it. It was a place where he moved after establishing a successful career as an artist and lived till he died. He painted the ocean from his studio repeatedly, yet each differently with warm but a little melancholy colour.

Richard Diebenkorn died on March 30, 1993.

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