Abstracted and Arranged: Hindman Presents Richard Diebenkorn
New & Noteworthy
Hindman is pleased to present High Green, Version II, 1992 by Richard Diebenkorn this September 21st in our fall Prints & Multiples auction.
Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) is most well-known for his large-scale, abstract paintings of carefully arranged geometries in mostly vertical compositions, balancing line, color, and space in the service of his particularly Californian light. Through the application of different printmaking methods, Diebenkorn’s prints allowed him to continue to build upon these themes, on a smaller scale. This is clear in High Green, Version II, 1992, a color aquatint with etching and drypoint. Printed by Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press, San Francisco—with whom Diebenkorn collaborated since he began to explore printmaking in 1961— High Green, Version II emphasizes a satisfying composition reflective of Diebenkorn’s purposeful employment of varied linemaking, balanced forms, and concentrated application of color emblematic of his mature career in the year prior to his death.
Born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn grew up San Francisco and spent most of his life in California. He worked for much of his career as a teaching artist in various universities such as University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. Diebenkorn had a wide range of artistic influences from Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse to Hans Hofmann, to Abstract Expressionism, then well in-vogue on the East coast. However, rather than copying any past or concurring style, Diebenkorn synthesized what interested him into a practice uniquely his own. This culminated in his most well-known series, Ocean Park, beginning in 1967: it features architecturally-balanced abstract compositions dependent on his environment—a celebration of the constant light flooding into his Santa Monica studio.
In 1988, Richard and his wife, Phyllis, moved to Healdsburg in northern California where he would remain for the rest of his life. In 1989, Diebenkorn had open heart surgery, after which his health was never quite the same, though his creativity and practice did not falter. He subsequently devoted an even greater amount of time to printmaking in 1991 and 1992 because of the smaller, more manageable, physical scale that printmaking entails and especially given he could offload the most physically rigorous element—the printing itself—to the highly skilled Crown Point team.[i] As seen in High Green, Version II, Diebenkorn was able to use printmaking to his advantage in its elements of unpredictability and range of mark making, including the washes of color achieved through aquatint, to balance his compositions.
High Green, Version II is an aerial map of inorganic shapes defined by contour lines and blocks of color. The majority of the composition is awash in soothing, undulating blue, bordered by smaller bands of color and line—greens, yellows, purples, and reds at the top and blacks and grays at the bottom—delineated by the natural edge of the plate to create the white border. The work is inhabited by mostly linear forms defined by various methods—from thick contour lines along edges to short scratches used to apply texture within color fields—such as the gray segment at the bottom right— to drops of aquatint wash in pale blue and pink. Diebenkorn was enchanted with the challenge and occasional unpredictability that printmaking allowed. As he told his daughter at Crown Point’s studio in 1992: “I’m making my drawing in spite of the metal. There are unseen forces there, and it’s always a competition with them. I think I’m going to make a straight line, and it says, ‘Oh no you don’t!”[ii] The stimulating limitations within printmaking nevertheless also allowed for the freedom of reworking the plate to perfect the desired effect, as shown here in this second state of High Green.
With his mostly straight edges, the eye is drawn to the one curvilinear form coursing through the center of the composition. Diebenkorn had noted that he was prone to placing more emphasis on intensity in the upper sections of a composition—a more “concentrated” and colorful space—before balancing this field of activity with a “less charged” space.[iii] This print thus emphasizes a spatial hierarchy yet still achieves harmony because there is no tonal hierarchy. The lack of depth achieved by the washes of color allows the eye to glide evenly over the print—particularly the curved line marking the shift from concentrated color at the top to neutral blacks, grays, and whites. Though more subdued in terms of color and activity, the forms of the lower half of the print balance the top through their echoing of the shapes and lines above—such as the white and green inverted triangle at the top repeated below through the white lines over the blue field tapering towards a V across the lower edge of the plate. Meanwhile, the pure expanse of the blue extending to the right edges acts as a calming field balancing the busy left edge. The overall effect is one that continually engages the viewer in this meditative repetition of shapes, variation of line, and soothing color palette—a distillation of Diebenkorn’s lifelong exploration of light and form mediated through printmaking.
[i] Kathan Brown, Ink, paper, metal, wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 24.
[ii] Ibid., 20.
[iii] Jane Levinson and Andrea Liguori, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné, volume 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 193.
