The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is set in its own majestic portico’d place, augmented with a sweeping addition. It seems very far away from the city, and to travel there is to be (somehow) in art. BMA presents the “Matisse-Diebenkorn” through January 29, 2017 and then, after a re-hanging, the show opens again at SFMOMA in the spring.
What would these two artists say to one another across time?
We know that Matisse went all the way to the edge of abstraction and just peered
over with great delicacy, (with “View of Notre Dame” in 1914, for example):
Pretty much everyone can picture a Matisse. Close your eyes.
Okay? Got one?
This is my Matisse, “Red Room (Harmony in Red)” from 1908:
To Begin
with Diebenkorn
Let’s start by thinking about the “new” guy. I had seen a massive
Diebenkorn exhibition at the Royal Academy (RA) in
London in
the spring of 2015.* The Royal
Academy offered generous texts on their walls and a thorough introduction to
the artist on their site. Here is an example:
To
weigh Diebenkorn’s reception in England, so Paul Carey-Kent, a financial policy
analyst and art critic, brought 6 “well-established
painters” to the RA’s Diebenkorn show, and recorded their comments along with
his own. Carey-Kent started with the assumption that Diebenkorn is “a painter’s
painter.” Half of his guests were pleased with the art on view, half were not. The
painters are: Katrina Blamin, Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger, Michael
Stubbs, D.J. Simpson and Dolly Tompsett ; see the article for details (www.artcritical.com/2015/05/04/paul-carey-kent-richard-diebenkorn).
In
the article, Michael Stubbs observes that Diebenkorn’s abstract work of the
1950’s was “typical of the early ‘50’s, in developing a Cubist space into more
fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously
construct and contradict the space.” YES. Diebenkorn faced into everything,
right up through Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, and found his own voice.
This is what makes him a “painter’s painter”: we can see him struggle, almost
watch him think. Diebenkorn reveals everything beautiful and unsightly,
brushstrokes that lesser artists would worry about exposing. Here is a detail
from “Ocean Park 43” (Royal Academy of Arts exhibition catalogue, 14 March-17
June, 2015, p. 140):
Look
at the escaped blue squiggle, up against a deliberate long dripped line. Now
take another look at the gray line that anchors the blue triangle: there is
another shape partly visible inside that. There are no straight lines on either
top or bottom of the purple stripe; the artist didn’t auto-correct. The green
drip slams into an orange line that then veers off to nothing, allowing the
green to re-appear. This is not the work of a minute. This apparent spontaneity
is earned through time and incredible patience on the part of the artist. Marking, erasure, marking, stopping.
Another
of the artists brought to the RA exhibition, D.J. Simpson, uses an electric
router to mark/draw onto his wood support, and then paints in the backgrounds to
make his art (his art is “fetishising,” says the artist and critic John
Chilver). Simpson thinks that Diebenkorn knew exactly “when there was enough
push and not enough pull.” I think
that, by “push” Simpson means the sustained agitation in the painting, flowing
and just a bit untethered. Here is the question... Does Simpson mean that
Diebenkorn would then add in the “pull” to lock in the work? Or does he mean
that Diebenkorn would allow the painting to remain un-resolved, that this state
of flux was the goal?
Matisse
and Diebenkorn
The
RA ‘s Diebenkorn show was big and beautiful. But it was a show that crested
with the Ocean Park series, as if all the previous work was only
preparatory. The hanging was rather
convincing as a yellow brick road, and it left me very little room to breathe.
In this context, I saw the 1950’s work as flawed, and left feeling odd. I
should have liked it; Diebenkorn is a painter’s painter, and, even more, an
abstract painter’s painter.
So
I was really eager to see the Matisse-Diebenkorn show. Would Diebenkorn flounder in the face of
the older man’s work? I had expected, because I have always loved him, to
gravitate to the Matisses. A brief
aside: here is a lovely Matisse, (not at the show at BMA), called “Entrance to
the Casbah,” (1912/3):
Years
ago, I had gone to a Matisse show** and loved many paintings with this intense
blue-dominated palette and come home immersed in what I thought of “Matisse
blue.” Bonnard said of a Matisse
on his walls that
By day it is the blue that takes the lead. What an intense
life the colors have, and how they vary with the light! (1946)
On
impulse, I added the color to every canvas then on my studio walls. It ruined
them all, of course, because the paintings hadn’t called for that kind of
interference. What kind of interference
would Matisse cause Diebenkorn? I thought blue might be involved.
But
I was wrong. It was black, deep and abiding black. (Black is so important that
one artist has recently claimed exclusive rights to the newest, strongest black
mixture, Vantablack (http://hyperallergic.com/279243/anish-kapoor-gets-exclusive-rights-to-the-worlds-darkest-pigment).
But
I get ahead of myself. I should
start with the observation that the wall texts and the essays for this show are
entirely convincing. The research is solid, the relationship clear. Diebenkorn studied
Matisse beginning with his days at Stanford. He saw Matisse’s paintings in the
home of Sarah Stein. He visited MOMA in New York and the Pompidou in Paris.
Diebenkorn owned forty-one books on Matisse, even loaning one to MOMA’s curator
John Elderfield in 1983 to help with an upcoming exhibition. Diebenkorn saw
little-known Matisse paintings as a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union
(Matisse/Diebenkorn catalogue, eds. Janet Bishop and Katherine Rothkopf, BMA
and SFMOMA, 2016).
Near
the show’s entrance, I found myself moving back and forth, looking at Matisse’s
“Studio, Quai Saint-Michel”:
And
then, with those two firmly in mind, I took in “Urbana 2”
And
“Urbana 6”:
And
basically didn’t want to move on. (So I will basically stay here for this
writing, but know that there are many, many more works in the show and go see
it!). The irony of the day was that the two Diebenkorn paintings had both been
in the RA show, but I obviously hadn’t SEEN them. I saw them now. And they blew me away. I remember thinking
about each one, “is it a room? a landscape? a state of mind?” The “Urbana” series was all that
abstract paintings are meant to be. They were open, un-resolvable, but there
might be a key, if I stood there long enough, maybe... I wanted to stay in
front of them forever. And what held me in was the black pigment. Look back at
“Urbana 6” and imagine just the black in outline as I drew it in my sketchbook:
The
shapes are powerful, even in outline, but here they are again in black:
The
black paint won’t give it up. It
hangs there, receding and coming forward as if it were actually moving. Curator
Janet Bishop writes about “Studio, Quai Saint-Michel” and “Urbana #4” that
... the young painter appears to have repurposed the blocks
of color that make up the Parisian studio interior to create a composition
seemingly devoid of familiar points of reference (catalogue, p. 23)
This
is the goal. The “pull,” Mr. Simpson, is left up to the viewer.
It
is as if Matisse lived long enough to move a little closer to that abstract edge;
Diebenkorn completes Matisse’s line of thought, taking the loose shutter
of “French Window at Collioure”
(which, curator Katherine Rothkopf writes, was changed by Matisse to cover
over ‘a balcony and a landscape in
the distance” were covered over by “a wash of black paint” [!!] (catalogue, p.
123) :
And
fastening it down (the “shutter” in Ocean Park #105):
*My
husband, Charles Tarlton, wrote a series of ekphrastic tanka prose about the
Ocean Park paintings, based on our visit; see artistinanaframe.blogspot.com,
the entry on Diebenkorn from 11/21/16; there is a drama in prose & poetry
on the relationship of Matisse and Picasso printed there as well.
