Richard Diebenkorn

Acquired by the present owner from the artist circa 1965

San Francisco, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings, 1961-1963, September - October 1963
New York, Poindexter Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn, October - November 1963

Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at (212) 606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This canvas is framed in a wood frame stained charcoal with a silver face and a small float.
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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Richard Diebenkorn’s remarkable career was shaped and ultimately defined by a balance struck between seemingly disparate artistic forces. Contrary to the prevailing stylistic philosophy of his generation – a group of artists operating in the wake of the Second World War whose compulsion toward an aesthetic break with Modernism inspired a disavowal of representational art – Diebenkorn determinedly and deliberately charted his own course, embracing the grand art historical tradition of figuration at the very moment that it was nearly lost. Though the first seven years of his mature professional life were spent incorporating into his work the vanguard American style of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, in 1955 Diebenkorn enacted a sudden shift to a purely representational mode, a track he would explore with boundless determination until the inception of his famed Ocean Park series in 1967. It was during this storied and extraordinary period that the artist created Two Women at Table in 1963. Reserved by Diebenkorn for his personal physician and close friend who specifically requested one of the artist’s figurative works after seeing a contemporaneous exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery in New York, this stunning painting was purchased directly from the artist and has remained in the same family collection for fifty years. The prized centerpiece to the collection of one of Richard Diebenkorn’s close and trusted friends, Two Women at Table has not been seen in public since the year of its execution and thus its appearance at auction represents a truly significant event.

Surrounded by an enigmatic darkness that serves only to enhance the profound intimacy of the depicted scene, the figures in Two Women at Table enact their roles as characters in Diebenkorn’s constructed narrative by deeply and exclusively engaging one another in conversation. With her back fully turned, the central figure leans in to her companion, the stripes of her skirt and deliberate delineation of her form seeming to presage the artist’s later predisposition towards a linear representation of physical space. Diebenkorn’s devout respect for the alchemical properties of his chosen media – the densely worked surfaces of his Ocean Park paintings are one of the definitive characteristics of that corpus – is also here readily apparent in the impressionistic treatment of the second figure’s visage. As if to evoke movement, the paint that describes this woman’s facial features has been blurred outside the loosely discernable contours of her jaw and neckline. Thus we are at once privileged in our singular viewpoint of this exceptional scene for the access we are granted into a genuinely private moment, and simultaneously denied any definitive understanding as to the particulars of the situation.  Ultimately, however, we receive Two Women at Table as a marvelously replete total image, in which Diebenkorn’s true painterly identity comes to the fore.

The various stylistic junctures that described Diebenkorn’s career resulted not only in a corpus abounding with innovation and beauty, but in a series of personal reflections on his own beliefs, decisions, and ultimate intentions. According to the artist himself, foremost among the fundamental concerns in his life and work was a deep-seated underlying commitment to aspects of the modernist tradition framed generations earlier by the great European masters. Painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse left an enduring impression on Diebenkorn, and their influence is perhaps nowhere as evident as in Two Women at Table. Above all, Matisse’s impact on the artist’s career, and the present work in particular, is irrefutable; not only was Diebenkorn’s visual description of space deeply informed by iconic works such as French Window at Collioure (1914), but the striped skirt of the central figure in Two Women at Table is a direct homage to Matisse’s Grande Odalisque à culotte bayadère (1925), of which Diebenkorn was acutely familiar. In theme, composition, and execution Diebenkorn here dons the mantle of his forebears, extending the oft-examined art historical motif of the conversation, or intimate exchange between two figures, into the late Twentieth Century and imbuing it with his own aesthetic individuality. The foremost champion of Modernism’s final chapter, Richard Diebenkorn steadfastly pioneered a novel vernacular that celebrated a hitherto unprecedented marriage between the fundamentals of abstraction and figuration, and Two Women at Table stands as an absolute archetype of this extraordinary investigation.