A Closer Look at Matisse/Diebenkorn’s Statement and Practice: Imagine with Both Feet on the Ground
In 1918, Henri Matisse finished a painting during his stay in Nice. Painted from his balcony in Hôtel Mediterranée, The Bay of Nice(1918 fig.1) shows a depiction of the shimmering Mediterranean sea occupying almost half of the canvas, stretching diagonally from the bottom left corner to the far horizon line which just about to mingle with the sky hidden behind a narrow slice of the landscape. Painted from direct observation, through the artist’s lens, one is provided with access to his most subjective imagination.
Fig.1. The Bay of Nice, 1918. Oil on canvas, 90x71cm. Private Collection
What we first experience follow along Matisse is the irresistible charm of the French Riviera. “When I realized that I would see this light every morning, I couldn’t believe my luck. The sea is blue, but bluer than anyone has ever painted it, a color entirely fantastic and incredible. It is the blue of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier, and the kingfisher melted together; and yet it is like none of these, for it shines with the unearthly radiance of Neptune’s kingdom; it is like nothing but itself, its color is so rich and deep you would think it opaque, and yet it gleams, it is translucent, it shines as if it were lit up from below.” In contrast with the massiveness of the portrayed sea, a vertical strip of light Naples yellow stands firmly attached to the right edge of the canvas, coming all the way down from top to bottom leaving only a cunning gap, indicating both compositional considerations and the depicted door’s functionality.
It is only after a second examination when we sense the mystery of the painted world—the space is reinvented rather than being made as an illusional attempt closer to physical experience. While we are all looking out towards the sea with the eye level of the doorknob, it is unfeasible that the horizon line is above it, given the building’s modest height. When traces of pentimenti that the artist left on the surface are eventually noticed, one realizes he lowered the height of the sketched balcony rails at least twice. It is a successful trick the painter executed in the far distance where the scale of architectural structures and human size to the natural landscape is impeccable so that the existence of the enormous palm tree sticking in the foreground and the miniature of the guardrails are undoubted. For any reason we can now only guess at, there is indeed, a feeling of obtaining an aerial view with a much open vision; concurrently being embraced by the immense seascape with a raised horizon line; he might hope, we could sense a kind of lighthearted freedom.
It is logical then, to find that Matisse believed in the necessity to be alert to the totality of a painting at any stage of its execution. Written in Notes of a Painter(1908), “In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirely: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator.” All elements within the visual language are thoughtfully manipulated: constant rearrangement of the composition, varying colors and values, a balance achieved of adjusting the tension between the interplay of different subjects and their relationships to one another; to work through the process to a finished painting, an adventure took solely by the artist alone.
Expression, nonetheless, is the fundamental impulse for Matisse to make a painting. In a 1945 interview with Léon Degand, the artist explicated the registration of emotion in his paintings:“ I work from feeling. I have my conception in my head, and I want to realize it. I can, very often, reconceive it. But I know where I want it to end up.” In Red Room(Harmony in Red, 1908 fig.2), the ecstasy extends out of the frame to reach us. Within an interior filled with a color of Cadmium red mixed with crimson, there are bits of other variants of red scattering around in the foreground: Sienna on the chair back, Oxide red on the rounded fruit, orange on the architectural frame, subtle pink surrounding the floral decoration, a purplish red on the wall as a resultant mixture of Ultramarine with red. Within a varied yet unified sea of red, space is dramatically reduced on this surface, as Matisse painted the table with the exact same color of the wall behind it. Without any shading or changes in the value of the color to indicate depth, space is only readable by the application of black contours separating and defining the edge of the depicted forms.
Fig.2. Red room(Harmony in Red), 1908. Oil on Canvas, 180.5x221cm. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
While the use of red contributes to the overwhelming passion indisputably, the swirl patterns on the table fabric and the wall bring the painting alive. In contrast with the stillness and solidity possessed by the woman, the decorative floral vines swing, twist, spread, all sharing an upward direction as if they are germinating. The overheated air inside the room seems to be cooled down to some extent by the dark green outside. However, one’s experience transcends the boundary between the indoor and outdoor, not only via the flattened space, but also with the radiant yellow paints which appear both in the center as the color of the fruits and the intense little dots among the open-air landscape into the distance, the latter of which were also pointing to flecks of flowers in the vase, not surprisingly, painted in brilliant yellow. The echoing of color used on these subjects serves as a guide to the eye to move back and forth in between different pictorial spaces and merges the two together.
When looking back to the only figure, the credibility of her presence starts to become questionable. While the black shirt weighs her down, the white dress which is blocked by the table of a cut-out shape gives the impression of her being floating in an ambiguous space. Painted with a less saturated cool white, the form of trees resemble the shape of clouds, a transformed entity of her stream of thoughts, constantly changing and unable to see through. The last puzzle of this painting lays in the top left corner where a symbolic pink house sits against the cobalt blue sky. The rectangle shape is an opportune balance to the mass of the chair seat right beneath it near the bottom edge, lifting the whole canvas; yet its curious color adds even more mysteries to the enclosed world.
Color and light play leading roles in Matisse’s paintings. Though closely related, they can also be treated independently. Influences were shown from his early Neo-Impressionist experiments, after reading Paul Signac’s “D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme”(“From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism”, 1898), in which Signac stated “the principle of the separation of elements.” “Light and color,” he wrote, “will be clearly separated, and the painter will give dominance sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other, as he pleases.” In Studio(1916 fig.3), the two elements were rendered simultaneously not only to serve expression but also as means to embed a fleeting time and space that perhaps reflect the artist’s state of mind.
Fig.3. Studio, 1916. Oil on Canvas, 148x116.8cm.The Phillips Collection, Washington, D,C.
Encountering the painting with a fresh impression, one senses a substantial warmth of light filling the interior of the painter’s studio. A female nude is bathing in the sunlight coming through the window, laying on her side on an orange-red blanket. The exterior window reveal is completely lit up, along with a small coffee table standing tall in the right-center. However, with time passing, the heat starts to fade and there comes a besiege of chillness. Colors of cool temperature are everywhere inside the room: a baby blue on the blanket as flower patterns, a dull turquoise blue teal side by side with a greenish ochre beside the window frame, a distinctive pinkish white on the wall, a faint purplish-white on the drawing board, a grayish-white on the legs of the coffee table. With further inspection one notes that the outdoor scene, which was supposed to be warm with logical expectation, was in fact painted with colors of cool temperature thoroughly. Even the seemingly warmth of direct sunshine on the female flesh was a mixture of Naples yellow with black and white to a resultant tonality that is muted, adding a subtle coolness to the warmth. On the contrary, there is warmth in the shadows: whilst the wall appears to be grey indigo, an under-layer of yellow ochre could be seen through; the greenish floor too, contains a much intense ochre showing from beneath.
The vigorous sense of light that the spectator experiences is not created solely through the use of color. It is amplified, instead, by the painter’s hand in employing the contrast between light and shadow and push it to an extreme. If we relate the display in the painting to the actual lighting in our physical world, natural light should be coming from the viewer’s right side out of the window in the same direction the woman faces. In that case, the wall should be receiving a similar amount of light as the body in front of it, given the narrow depth of this room. As it is shown, Matisse intentionally painted the wall so much darker, at the same time, the light poured over the torso seemed to become brighter precisely because of the contrasting darkened tone behind it. He once said: “I painted light in black.”
Yet the world that Matisse provides us is still fully believable for the viewer as various kinds of light and shadow are included. For the depicted light: one senses the sun glints on the coffee table which could be made of glass; the chair gleams in the light with its waxed wooden surface; part of the right rectangle on the wall glitters as if it is a piece of mirror, or it could be the shape of an intense light penetrating a semi-transparent curtain which causes the soft glowing effect; and finally the reflective light on the ceiling, on the drawing board, on the window glass and the wall as luminous planes. For the representation of shadow: one perceives the absolute black in the foreground and under the bridge just as the darkest occlusion shadow; while the gloomy casting shade on the floor and the wall arise the sentiment of late night. The range of light and shadow in Matisse’s work is so full that one can associate his sensual experiences of the light in life and connect to the painted world in almost the same way, neglecting its artificial nature.
The alternation of warm and cool, the dramatic and subtle contrast of brightness and darkness, the natural and imagined light and shadow, all of which contribute to the harmonious delivery of an overall feeling of balance. By incorporating opposing elements in the same picture, one is given an open possibility of experiencing pair of extreme poles in a consolidated world: a world in which night and day, warmness and coldness, indoor and outdoor both coexist and are interchangeable.
For Matisse, the idea of reaching a moment of balance is the desired goal to achieve: equilibrium suggests lasting duration. “I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at one sitting, but I would soon tire of it, therefore, I prefer to rework it so that later I may recognize it as representative of my state of mind. There was a time when I never left my paintings hanging on the wall because they reminded me of moments of over-excitement and I did not like to see them when I was calm. Nowadays I try to put serenity into my pictures and rework them as long as I have not succeeded.” Through ceaseless reworking, time allows the painter to internalize his ever-changing subject with hope and comprehend its essence to attain a greater beauty and grandeur. “A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to obtain greater stability. Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.”
Offered with a majestic and dreamy vision, one might be astonished to Matisse’s methodology of painting on-site with the subject in front of him for many years of his practice. When painting portraits, he would consider the sitter’s “character, her human expression, the quality of surrounding light, the atmosphere…” Lydia Délectorskaya, former personal assistant to the artist, recorded in her notebook that Matisse would not make any changes to the work during the break between sessions until the model came back to position. As an intense observer, he believed in only through studying nature one might be able to extract the essence beneath the appearance. “Those who work in a preconceived style, deliberately turning their backs on nature, miss the truth. An artist must recognize, when he is reasoning, that his picture is an artifice; but when he is painting, he should feel that he has copied nature. And even when he departs from nature, he must do it with the conviction that it is only to interpret her more fully.”
With all the grace and the seeming effortlessness of his completed work, as Aragon said “ is the greatest illusion about the whole thing. Matisse is a difficult artist.” It is the creator’s decision to hide his personal struggles in the process which might extend for years to come to a finish. With a special piece Notre Dame(1914 fig.4), one might be able to peek into the undertaking carried along with a painting’s progression.
Fig.4.（Left） Notre Dame, 1914. Oil on Canvas, 147.3x94.3cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Fig.5.（Right）Notre Dame, 1914. Oil on Canvas, 147x98cm. Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Dübi-Mü ller-Stiftung, Switzerland
At first glance, nothing is resolved. There is a lack of any kind of representation indicating its subject. A vast expanse of blue covered most of the canvas, with an approximate square-shape defined by black outlining strokes presenting itself in the upper left-center. A forceful straight line rising from the bottom left corner pointing to a circle of green closely aside the square shape to its right. Gradually, with traces of lines revealing themselves under the blue paint layer, one starts to sense that these are the attempted lines the artist lied by tracing the forms and rearranging the contours of the motif. Only when compared with another painting(fig.5) executed in the same year with the same title of almost the same size, one understands the complexity and limitlessness of the painter’s pictorial exploration.
Painted from the artist’s studio overlooking the river with a frontal view of the church in the distance, the work is a genuine reinvention rooted in its physical reality. Pentimenti lines are tangible recordings of Matisse’s constant observation of the environment: of the studio’s window frame and its decoration, of the riverbank, of the bridge, of its arch, of the passages of ships and boats traveling on the water, of the walking pedestrians; it is indeed a crystalized flow of time in the daily life. The adding and accumulation of lines, however, stopped at one point and started to be veiled. The painter was courageous to risk losing everything but to achieve what possessed him at that moment. He must have let the ethereal feeling govern him: when he decided to raise the portrayed church higher above the ground; to erase the distinction between earth and sky and bring out a unity; to both created a passage obstructing in between him and the spirited embodiment, and a solid-access free from any constraints of perspective to cross over the barrier and literally kiss the symbol. There is even a bodily levitation felt when one associates a free ballon approaching an open window, which if he squeezes his eyes when looking at this painting, might find the visual resemblance; even the cool pinkish highlight on the body of the church is as lightly painted as a piece of cloud.
It is stunning to see how the artist is able to transform the enormous physicality of Notre-Dame to the arising feeling of levitation. Certainly, the reality that Matisse presents in his paintings is a blended complexity. It contains an extraction of what the artist perceives in front of him and what he decides to put down on the canvas; a verisimilitude of visual experience yet an abstraction created by the very nature of paints as mere materials. It presents the artist’s will of obtaining hegemony over the reality in front of him and his sole devotion to making an anew conception of the reality of his own world. In 1942, the painter clearly stated out this relationship of his construction beyond the subject: “My progress, I consider I have made some progress when I note in my work an increasingly evident independence from the support of the model… The model is a springboard for me—it’s a door which I must break down to reach the garden in which I am alone and so happy—even the model exists only for the use I can make of it.”
Forty years apart between the two artists, Matisse’s influence is everywhere in Diebenkorn’s work, both in his abstract and representational pieces. The younger painter was first exposed to Matisse during his undergraduate years at Stanford University in Daniel Mendelowitz’s art history course. Impressed with the student’s seriousness in pursuing art, Mendelowitz introduced Diebenkorn to Sarah Stein, one of the most enthusiastic collectors of avant-garde art whose collection included more than a hundred pieces by Matisse. Upon their visit to the house, Diebenkorn would have seen many paintings of the elder master which were on permanent display, including The Bay of Nice(1918), Women with a Hat(1905), Open Door, Brittany(1896), Still Life with Blue Jug(1900-1903), Landscape: Broom(1906), an oil sketch of The Joy of Life(1905-06), portraits of Sarah and Michael Stein(both 1916). However, it was not until his visit to Washington DC and Phillips Gallery in particular in 1943, when he later recalled in an interview, that he felt “was hit hard” confronting Studio: “that was the big one for me. And I did a lot of looking at that”.
By comparing with Sleeping Woman(1961 fig.6), a painting which was executed decades later by Diebenkorn during his Berkley representational period, one might be able to seek the direct influence of Matisse in its resolution. A female seems to be asleep, sitting with one leg curled and hidden under her dress, the other one solidly landing on the bottom edge of the picture plane. In front of her, there is a mirror in which part of her reflection is shown. Geometric planes could be seen behind her, only after been recognized as drawings or other pictures, the surface that they attached to could be read as a piece of wall. Nonetheless, the rest of the painting stays incomprehensible.
Fig.6. Sleeping Woman, 1961. Oil on Canvas, 177.8x147.3cm. Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan
Without any indication of an outer light source, the space around her was depicted too dark in contrast with her flesh which makes her appear to be a light source herself, glowing from inside out. Taking a closer look, one starts to notice the distortion of her counterpart in the mirror, of not doubling her posture in a supposedly symmetrical way. One of her hands reaches out and touches an arm in the mirror, a bridge connecting two worlds. Instead of being a representation of a woman in her dream, the painting is the dream on its own. We are in the same place with the woman in her unconscious mind, drifting in an ambiguous space on the verge of an almost black abyss. The successful transmission of this emotion is created by extreme contrast in the value of colors and compositional arrangement of forms which results in an imagined space existing only in the painted world, just as what Matisse did in Studio.
The Mirror is a motif that both artists frequently used, as a means to extend the sense of space and evoke psychological reflections. In The Table(1957 fig.7), mirrors seem to be applied on both walls; a long table is placed at the corner where the two join. Despite the vast empty space left out in the foreground, in the reflection, three chairs scattered with huge distance in between them, an imperceptible exaggeration of proportion plays its trick to help the artist build this enormous space that does not exist outside the picture. Being inside an interior, however, there evokes a feeling of standing in an open-air landscape within its wilderness. While the deep green floor transforms into a field of grassland, the white table cloth, with its warm yellow highlight and cool servers-blue shadow, arouses the sensual experience of being under blinding sunlight. When looking at the reflected horizon line, an underground of dark blue is visible through the application of a thin layer of yellow paint that covers it up. The effect of this bold move pushes the painting further away from a representation of the real world into its own realm: it demolishes the boundary between indoor and outdoor and creates a limitless space by stretching towards both side edges to infinity; it also makes the reflected world a solid world by itself, turning the imitated sky into a whole new sky that is independent of the preconceived reality.
Fig.7. The Table, 1957. Oil on Canvas, 76.2x68.3cm. Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collection
Both Matisse and Diebenkorn were interested in the treatment of interior and exterior, in which sometimes they tried to make them interchangeable or unified. As Matisse said: “the wall of the window does not create two different worlds. ” The quality of transformable and the potential of becoming are embedded in both of their paintings. In Diebenkorn’s personal note, he wrote: “
Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as a stimulus for further moves.
Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.
Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”
The most important practical commonality of both artists is a quality of attentiveness, a mixture of judgement and intuitive alertness, about what happens in the process of making a painting; they are willing to risk making changes in any state in order to push the work further.
Opposed to Matisse, Diebenkorn hardly worked from direct observation for his paintings, however, thousands of drawings of figures coming from his practice of life drawing in the evenings together with David Park and Elmer Bischoff in the 1950s and 60s provided visual source materials that acted as a foundation for his memory and imagination to inspire. In an oral interview with Susan Larsen in 1985, Diebenkorn explained how the drawings were used: “Lots of the figures start with, from a sketch from the evening[session-Ed. ]. And I just can’t tell you which ones. Some of them stayed pretty much like the drawings, others changed or get painted out completely once the painting was going, and I might just improvise the figure, invent it.”
Fig.8. Interior with View of Building, 1962. Oil on Canvas, 213.4x170.2cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
This exercise in seeing provides Diebenkorn the ability to make figures within his paintings credible, not necessarily in a conventional way, but in the specific way he wanted it to be. In Interior with View of Building(1962 fig.8), the portrayed woman is the key element that determines the interpretation of the work. Upon initial encountering, one might be overwhelmed by the intense light projecting on the outdoor architectures, it is reasonable to immediately recognize that the contrasting dark shadow created an interior space where the spectator is placed in. What starts to cause confusion, however, is the picture of a woman leaning against the wall. The use of color and light is too bright for a picture to hide in the dark, which makes the depicted woman become so vivid that she seems to be present at this exact moment with us. When we compare the architectural depiction in the picture with the outdoor buildings, we grasp the visual similarity and start to imagine that maybe she once seated in the chair, turned back to look out; that she is indeed a real person who visited this space before, looking at the outdoor view with the same attitude just like us.
This space is a built artifice, yet, with psychological reflection, one forgets that we are actually looking at a picture within a picture, and starts to believe in the space within the painting frame as reality. It is further enhanced by the device of a hand mirror painted in the bottom left corner. The reflected sky and orange-yellow highlight are so lively that make this space even more believable and earthly. The triangular dark blue shadow cast by the head of the women imitates the pyramidal purplish shade shielded by the structure of the building in the distance, even their placement in the painting is on the same vertical line. This corresponding relationship gives supplementary evidence that the two subjects share the same level of reality; within this painting, another conception of truth is created.
Diebenkorn’s approach to abstract and representational paintings in terms of its open declaration of process, the aim at the creation of form, and registration of emotion is in fact the same. The seemingly two discrete poles are not strictly divided for the painter. As he noted: “All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract…a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.”
Looking at the artist’s early abstract paintings, the viewer might find it difficult to relate them to any references of imagery. It is only after being immersed in the same natural environment where the artist developed his visual language that one might imagine into his creative process and insights. Location was not a mere backdrop for Diebenkorn to spend a certain period of his life in; it was an indirect, yet significant influence in the works for which a sense of place was predominant. As his close friend William Brice recalled, “I don’t know of any artist who was more responsive to his physical environment than Dick. If he moves down the block, it changes everything. He absorbed the aura of a place.” Diebenkorn also responded in a similar way, “Very often if you go to the locale where an artist works you’ll suddenly really know that you’re in that person’s area. If you go to Arles, you feel the Van Gogh around you.”
In Berkeley #57(1955 fig.9), the evocative of natural elements of the west coast could be perceived through the artist’s treatment of color, lines, forms as well as brushstrokes. Fields of diverse colored-paint bring to mind different sections of geological beds which are layered, textured, varied in size and their utilization. A narrow band of cobalt blue depicted in the upper right corner aspires to be like a running river; while irregular shapes of dark colors of deep grey and violet remind one of casted shadow on the ground by passing clouds. The bright yellow tone that almost dominants the painting is not a visual resemblance of the soil, but as a color and a feeling it provokes that the artist associated with the land: an astounding warmth that one felt being in the sunlight of the Southwest. Subtle changes of value, saturation, and hue of colors nearly reflect the changing light and its effect on parts of the terrain throughout different times of the day.
Fig.9. (Left)Berkeley #57, 1955. Oil on Canvas, 149.2x149.2cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Fig.10. (Right)
The bird-eye perspective, as one perceives, did not emerge out of the painter’s imagination; it was in fact inspired by his observation during his first flight in 1951 from Albuquerque to San Francisco. Thinking of the experience, Diebenkorn reflected, “The aerial view showed me a rich variety of ways of treating a flat plane—like flattened mud or paint. Forms operating in shallow depth reveal a huge range of possibilities available to the painter.” The visual impact kicks in the subconscious. “I was absolutely knocked out and thrilled, really taken… It wasn’t that I went right to the canvas and said I’m going to paint this but it just went right into the mill and started coming out strong”
An aspect that is often been overlooked but yet essential for the painting in arising a sense of the Bay Area’s topography is the increased contrast of scale. It might be confusing for one to see clearly how Diebenkorn achieved in convincing its vastness as a whole with so many color fragments. By changing the picture into monochrome(fig.10), the confidential magic is finally revealed to its viewer. Although numerous colors were applied, a lot of their values are in fact very close to each other; the result is the formation of a blended unity composed with colors of similar brightness. There are small blocks of highlights and seemingly dark shadows seen one place or another in the painting; its overall proportion in relating to the dominating middle tone, as the artist consciously planned, always stays minor. The tremendous contrast of scale between the very little dots of paint and thin lines with the built-up entity in its wholeness is indispensable for one in awaking his senses of experiencing the scale of the human-built environment in relation to nature.
We could say, the early abstract works present to the viewer how the painter is able to internalize ways of observing his surrounding environment and translating personal experience of the physical world into paintings. Diebenkorn responded to the increasing sense of scale in his paintings since Albuquerque: “Sense of scale…I think that has a lot to do with the Southwest, because the scale is, there is something that really is kind of overwhelming and most apparent [when] one is there…They sky is no larger in Albuquerque than here, and yet is seems immerse there. ” The contrasting scale of different elements is embedded in the work for the rest of his practice, even evident in the life drawings of models in the 1950s throughout 60s.
Fig.11.Untitled, 1964. Ink and canté crayon on paper, 28.3x44.5cm. Collection of Gretchen and John Berggruen
In Untitled(1964 fig.11), a depiction of a woman is seen reclining to the right, elbow raised, with one hand supporting her head and the other relaxing along her side. However, the space within the drawing, a world reduced to black and different shades of grey, remains blurred. One can only speculate from the huge murky shape that she almost immerses herself in, with the bright curved-line indicating an edge, that she might be lying on a sofa. However, the scale of her body seems immense despite the actual modest size of the drawing(28.3x44.5cm). Without any other recognizable subject to compare with, the scale of her torso becomes expandable. Placed in front of a blackness that provides an almost infinite space, her body turns into the scale of a landscape. It is what the artist allowed, both his subject and his execution to be variables that altered the very nature of the painting process and the final work:
It Interests me also that the different forms painters use, such as landscape, still life, or figure, bring out very different qualities. I see this in most painters of the past and certainly in myself. In this time there is one more option—that of not representing, which can bring out yet another set of things.
Both Matisse’s and Diebenkorn’s work are connected deeply with the physical world that we all participate in, yet their methodology of making a painting is different regardless of a great commonality shared in their final work. They possessed colliding state of mind from the starting point. Matisse believed that the painter has to be clear about his vision and do everything to realize it. “For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning…If there is order and clarity in the picture, it means that from the outset this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter, or that the painter was conscious of their necessity. ” While for Diebenkorn, he did not have a preconceived image to work to a finished product. “I think that my necessity to work and rework a canvas in order to realize it becomes a process wherein my idea or ideas are externalized. I find that I can never conceive a painting idea, put it on canvas, and accept it…Almost from the beginning, I looked forward with relief to being able to correct, to set things right…It was as though I’d failed in my performance but somehow was able to steal this second chance and thereby come up with something that I could set out with the works of my peers(which were, of course, first crack)…Later yet I began to feel that what I was really up to in painting, what I enjoyed almost exclusively, was altering-changing what was before me—by way of subtracting or juxtaposition or superimposition of different ideas.” In other words, Diebenkorn arrived at his paintings through the process of working.
The ever-changing state of a painting for Matisse is a record of how he experimented with all methods in order to achieve his preconceived idea. To keep the painting in a state of flux for Diebenkorn, however, served distinctive means. As Kyle Morris noted on the painter’s Berkeley abstract pictures, he pointed out a significant distinction between means and end in seeing Diebenkorn’s works: “The phrase ‘accidental discovery’ has been bandied about a good deal, meaning that the artist did not begin with a preconceived idea of what his painting would be, but rather, by working directly upon the canvas, discovered his painting as it emerged. This phrase tends to imply that no controls governed the painting, but this situation has never existed, for the artist has always been present… This type of painting does not start with nature and arrive at paint, but on the contrary, starts with paint and arrives at nature(although it can be of an unexpected kind).”
Moving from abstract to representational, Diebenkorn recalled the difference in his state of mind in pursuing approaches: “As soon as I started using figures my whole idea of my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment or the painting itself—in a way that I welcomed. Because you don’t have this in abstract painting…Well, there are things that they can do it, in abstract painting, but one doesn’t have, isn’t dealing with forms that have their, in a sense, their own existence. They aren’t entities that leave you one…In abstract painting one can’t deal with a kind of entity, entity like an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to what, where the figure isn’t in the painting….And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between something that can be, elements that can be wildly different and can be at war, or in extreme conflict.” Ultimately, mostly painting in his studio, Diebenkorn did not try to depict nature, but aspire to be like nature. He talked about a painting that evoked the sense of nature only after he finished it: “This was, believe or not, accidental. It looks so much like grass and possibly ocean and then….menace in the sky, and it looks as though I really intended that, but I didn’t see that. I worked rather late on it last night, and got pretty upset with it and…[But , Then] I didn’t realize that problem until I walked in this morning. I said, ‘Oh, my. I’ve done this lovely little landscape through a doorway.’” For Diebenkorn, it is the very performances of paints as materials and his manipulation of them into active surfaces, colors, to make objects “sit right” in the paintings, the relationship of forms, weights, gravity, spatiality that formed a whole new reality one is able to relate back to our physical world.
Standing in front of their paintings, one is immersed into a heavenly nature that Matisse and Diebenkorn both succeeded in creating. A world that is constructed partly out of imagination but based on the most humble observation and honest physical experience of their natural environment. A legacy left by two masters for the later generations to contemplate and, just to fully experience.
Notes：
Gerry “Matisse in Nice: through an Open Window,” That's How The Light Gets In, October 1, 2013, https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/matisse-in-nice-through-an-open-window/.
Rebecca Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Claudine Grammont, “CÉZANNE VERSUS SIGNAC,” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 32-33.
Celeste Ingraffia, “Henri Matisse, ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908),” Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter" (1908) , accessed March 28, 2021, https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AFkpw6CDtRdYJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.austincc.edu%2Fnoel%2Fwritings%2Fmatisse%2520-%2520notes%2520of%2520a%2520painter.pdf%2B&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=vn.
“Interview with Léon Degand, 1945,” in Flam, Matisse on Art, p.44
Rebecca Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Claudine Grammont, “‘A PICTURE IS LIKE A GAME OF CARDS,’” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 15-19.
Rebecca A. Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Dorthe Aagesen, “PAINTING THE LIGHT,” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 107-116.
Rebecca A. Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Samantha Rippner, “THEMES AND VARIATIONS,” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 164-169.
Lydia Delectorskaya “‘You Haven't Understood a Thing,’” in With Apparent Ease-- Henri Matisse: Paintings from 1935-1939 (Paris: Adrien Maeght Editeur, 1988), p. 25.
Rebecca A. Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Rémi Labrusse, “NOTRE-DAME BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH,” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), pp. 72-77.
Rebecca A. Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen, and Cécile Debray, “SUPERNATURAL INTERIORS,” in Matisse: in Search of True Painting: Exhibition, Centre Pompidou, Musee National D'Art Moderne, Paris, Mar. 7-June 18, 2012, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, July 14-Oct. 28, 2012, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 4, 2012-Mar. 17, 2013 (New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), p. 94.
Janet Bishop, Katherine Rothkopf, and Janet Bishop, “Making Matisse His Own: Richard Dibenkorn's Early Abstractions and Figurative Paintings,” in Matisse/Diebenkorn (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016), pp. 19-29.
“Oral History Interview with Richard Diebenkorn, 1985 May 1-1987 December 15,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, accessed March 28, 2021, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-richard-diebenkorn-11813#transcript.
Janet Bishop, Katherine Rothkopf, and John Elderfield, “Imagining into Another,” in Matisse/Diebenkorn (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016), pp. 13-16.
Steven A. Nash, Emma Acker, and Timothy Burgard.“The Nature of Abstraction,” in Richard Diebenkorn the Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 (San Francisco, Calif: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2013), pp. 13-36