Richard Diebenkorn

Poindexter Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 1961

Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum, Richard Diebenkorn, September - October 1960, cat. no. 41
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Recent Paintings, October - November 1960, cat. no. 17
New York, Poindexter Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn, March - April 1961
Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Richard Diebenkorn, May - June 1961, cat. no. 16
Pacific Grove, Pacific Grove Art Center, The Morgan Flagg and Flagg Family Foundation Collection, May - June 1972
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum; Washington, D.C.; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland, The Oakland Museum, Richard Diebenkorn, Paintings and Drawings, 1943 - 1976, November 1976 - November 1977, cat. no. 38, p. 69, illustrated
San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Bay Area Art from the Morgan Flagg Collection, October 1997 - January 1998, cat. no. 14, p. 13, illustrated in color
Sacramento, University Library Gallery, California State University, Bay Area Figuration Show, March - May 2005, illustrated in color (on electronic catalogue)
San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, 2005 - 2009 (extended loan)

Gay M. Weaver, "California School Shown at Art Center," Monterey County Herald, June 9, 1972
Robert T. Buck Jr., et. al., Richard Diebenkorn, Paintings and Drawings, 1943 - 1980, New York, 1980, fig. 38, p. 69, illustrated
Victoria Dalkey, "In Figurative Sense: Postwar Bay Area Movement Stars in CSUS Exhibit," Sacramento Bee, March 13, 2005

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This canvas is framed in a maple frame with light rub gold over red clay face and dark brown sides.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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While retaining the richly painted surfaces of his earlier abstractions, Richard Diebenkorn turned toward a more figurative mode of expression in the late 1950s.  This move constituted a rebellion against the reigning propensity toward abstraction, signaling a shift on his part from what was then the dominant mode of modern aesthetic thinking.  Cane Chair - Outside from 1959 is an outstanding example of the artist's new body of figurative work that would surpass his earlier abstractions both in importance and expressive power.  The sun-drenched pinks and yellow contrasted with the rich blues and purples introduce a new chromatic mood into the artist's palette.  In Cane Chair – Outside, one can also observe an affinity between the foreshortened space, luminous color tones, and vertical linear structure of these representational works with Diebenkorn's later signature series, the Ocean Park paintings.

In the mid-1950s, Diebenkorn's Berkeley abstract landscape paintings were the subject of widespread acclaim.  Amidst the favorable attention his pictures attracted, the artist made his decisive departure from such abstract expressionist explorations.  Dissatisfied with the lack of tension and boundaries that abstraction afforded, Diebenkorn sought a form of expression that would allow him to renegotiate the elements of his visual repertoire.  As the artist recalled, "when I stopped abstract painting and started figure painting it was as though a kind of constraint came in that was welcomed because I had felt that in the last of the abstract paintings around '55, it was almost as though I could do too much too easily.  There was nothing hard to come up against.  And suddenly the figure painting furnished a lot of this." (Diebenkorn interviewed by Gail Scott in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, 1969, p. 6)

Cane Chair - Outside represents the pinnacle of what would soon be the artist's celebrated figurative period. Large interlocking planes of color successfully synthesize representational and non-objective elements.  The chair as the centerpiece of Diebenkorn's composition, straddles the two swaths of light – the bright sun and the dark purple shadow.  The chair teeters on this brink and the viewer wonders which way the light will move.  Will the chair end up completely in shadow or will sunlight envelop the entire composition?  There is an additional layer of psychological tension as we are faced with the empty chair – is it inviting or a symbol of loss?  Like objects in the paintings of Henri Matisse, Diebenkorn's chair is at once both expressive and objective.  Matisse was a constant inspiration for Diebenkorn.  Matisse's genius for reductive geometry that implies just enough perspective to suggest interior space is fully evidenced in The Window- Interior with Forget-me-nots from 1916.  The linear composition and intersecting color fields of Matisse's work clearly influenced Diebenkorn in his work from the late 1950s such as Cane Chair – Outside.

Diebenkorn's masterful manipulation of color and light can also be compared to Pierre Bonnard's use of bright colors to create a sense of illumination within domestic settings.  In the tradition of Bonnard, he boldly introduced a luminous palette of saturated color consisting of layers of paint that achieve a rich, complex impasto.  In doing so, he imbued the painting with a complex, palpable intensity; one can feel both the heat of the California sun and the cool shadow cast onto the patio from the fence.  Diebenkorn juxtaposed quiet somber purplish blues and diaphanous, glowing yellows and pinks on opposing sides of the composition. Cane Chair -Outside contains these tensions and juxtapositions yet still retains a sense of intimacy and atmosphere evoked by the presence of seemingly familiar discernible details and flattened cool geometry.

If the representational imagery in the present work were to be removed from this composition, the strong diagonal intersecting the horizontal planes could easily be translated into the artist's later and perhaps most well known Ocean Park compositions of light and shadow, color and form.  The present work was one of the 18 works chosen for the 1961 Diebenkorn show at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.  In Gifford Phillips' introduction to the catalogue for this show, he noted that the artist "has developed a concern with composition, whereas most painters today are principally concerned with space." (Exh. Cat. Washington D.C., Richard Diebenkorn, 1961)  It is abundantly clear in the present work that Diebenkorn had developed a fondness for a particular structure for his compositions that would continue on into his later Ocean Park series.  Cane Chair- Outside is an expressive masterpiece that conveys the force and vigor of Diebenkorn's gestural workmanship.