Exhibition of the week: Diebenkorn in New Mexico

Exhibition of the week

Diebenkorn in New Mexico

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

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Through Sept. 7

Abstract art was mostly an East Coast phenomenon until Richard Diebenkorn came along, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. The Oregon-born painter was not yet 30 when he came to New Mexico in 1950 to “focus full time on his art.” But he already had made a name in the art world, working with such giants of the New York art scene as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. “This vibrant show traces the artist’s restless search for his own identity” as he threw off those influences and forged his own style. Diebenkorn seems to have drawn inspiration from the wide-open spaces and jagged mesas that surrounded him, transforming the New Yorkers’ abstract-expressionist motifs into his own Western-inflected idiom. “His intense exploration is reflected in blotches of color and scrawling lines” that seem ready to burst off the canvases.

These paintings are best thought of as abstract landscapes, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. “Not the earth-on-the-bottom-and-the-sky-on-top kind of landscapes we typically think of, but something closer to aerial views of the ground.” In the pink and yellow patches of the desert, Diebenkorn found forms that turned out to be well suited to the painting methods he’d learned from Rothko, Still, and Willem de Kooning. Yet “what you see in Diebenkorn’s New Mexico paintings is not just the new, but the old.” Diebenkorn’s best works from this era also reflect the influence of even earlier modern masters, including Cézanne and Matisse. Diebenkorn “fell in love with those masters of Euro­pean modernism during frequent visits to the Phillips Collection” while stationed in D.C. during World War II. Yet only in New Mexico did he apply those lessons in evocative selection and application of color.

The “exploratory exuberance” of Diebenkorn’s youthful experiments

provides fascinating insight into the evolution of his art, said Mario Naves in The New York Observer. Unfor­tunately, this exhibition includes too many mediocre examples of it. In truth, this phase of the artist’s career was more or less a learning period, “a necessary pit stop” on the way to the more geometrically complex and luxuriantly colored images he would produce after settling in California. “Think of the New Mexico paintings as the work of an artist sowing his wild oats before settling into hard-won mastery.”