“Matisse/ Dibenkorn”

The sustained engagement of one artist with the work of another was unusual before the 20th century; there is Manet looking at Goya, yes, but later, the proliferation of colour reproductions accompanied by the first international museum shows, along with greater opportunity for widespread individual travel, provided opportunities for close study of one artist’s work by another. The exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art brings to us an enlightening example of a remarkable second act from a painter immersed in what remains startlingly original early 20th-century work. “Matisse/ Diebenkorn” is an impressive, tightly hung exhibit, where Nice outside the studio window sits beside a view of a California highway, where the diffused light of the Île de la Cité returns as a mist on the Pacific.

If there is a question about the degree of Diebenkorn’s visual involvement with his own experience of place and time—of the guiding example of Matisse providing limitations to his work as well as opportunities—it hardly seems to matter, touring this exhibit. What both painters share, and what is becoming more and more compelling in gallery-going when looking at even recent historical painting, is an example offered of an alternative way of looking and thinking—pre-Instagram, pre- Photoshop, pre-digital projector. In his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, American writer Nicholas Carr writes about the Internet chipping away at his capacity for concentration and contemplation. Matisse and Diebenkorn appear committed to concentration and contemplation, not necessarily to generate a visual experience of verisimilitude, but rather, through invention to provoke surprise and even delight. They test material and chromatic possibilities in translating what is observed, and then revise, reconsider and repeat the process until presumably, the studio light goes for the day.

In fact, Diebenkorn was a checker of the network in a predigital age; we see this throughout the show by the inclusion of examples from his library placed in vitrines. The catalogues and monographs point up the dates when he became aware of specific Matisse works in reproduction— discoveries of unencountered paintings that sparked him in the studio. The Baltimore exhibit includes his copy of the catalogue for Lawrence Gowing’s “Matisse 1869-1954: A Retrospective” at the Hayward Gallery in 1968. Here, Diebenkorn saw a reproduction of The silence that lives in houses, from 1947, a painting that had formal repercussions for him, and the title of which might have been a minor manifesto. Something of his enthusiasm for Matisse is communicated by his use of Alfred H Barr, Jr.’s Matisse His Art and His Public (1951) as a kind of scrapbook, pasting other reproductions of Matisse paintings onto the blank pages.

The show is punctuated by these critical instances of reference, as indeed was Diebenkorn’s working life. But the crucial exhibitions of Matisse’s work that he actually saw are necessarily a structural focus for this exhibition. These generative encounters with paintings occur over a period of more than 20 years. They comprise a series of “first contacts” in the late 1940s, the Hermitage visit in 1964 and two Los Angeles exhibitions in 1952 and 1966.

Diebenkorn first saw Matisse paintings at the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1944. The Baltimore exhibit sets the first of his reworkings of Matisse’s colour and composition in the 1950s when Diebenkorn was making muscular, gestural paintings in an abstract expressionist mode (something like the work of de Kooning and Grace Hartigan at that time). In the same “early first contacts” period, Diebenkorn visited the Cone Collection in Baltimore in 1947 and saw Matisse’s early Yellow Pottery from Provence, and the show makes much of his reuse of the palette from that painting in his abstract Berkeley 47 of 1955.

Diebenkorn’s work was then firmly located in an idiom that might be termed “fifties nonessentialist Ab-Ex”—as representation broke down into a way of painting that emphasized his presentness as gestural mark-maker (without chasing down the sublime as did another contemporary strand of American painting). The show leads us to assume that it must have been the range of possibilities he recognized in Matisse’s work that resulted in his break from this and led him instead to begin more forthrightly representational painting around 1955. From that point angles created spaces, providing the skeleton of the paintings rather than the optical properties of colour being used to suggest depth, with marks made more consciously on the surface. We see this at Baltimore in Man and Woman in a Large Room (1957) and Woman on a Porch from a year later. These paintings look back to the St Michel studio work at the Phillips and to Interior at Nice of 1919, particularly.

The curators, Katherine Rothkopf from Baltimore and Janet Bishop from San Francisco, have sought the closest, clearest relationships from the later to the earlier paintings: Matisse’s Interior with a Violin (1918) is hung beside Diebenkorn’s Interior with Doorway (1962), both with irregular panels of light from outside interrupting dark interiors. Matisse gives us a fragment of sea and palm tree at Nice outside the window, while Diebenkorn, a sunlit gas station. Matisse’s exploratory, interrogative drawing was, of course, fundamental to his work; an example here is Goldfish and Palette from 1914, an extraordinary record of revision through scratched excisions. The curators juxtapose this with Diebenkorn’s leaving evidence of various possible drawing resolutions apparent in the sweep of a road in his Ingleside, from 1963.

Rothkopf and Bishop propose Matisse’s The Piano Lesson from 1916 as a work of lasting influence, representative of Matisse’s work from the teens, the period that is the great wellspring for the American—particularly those paintings Diebenkorn saw on a trip to the USSR in 1964. At the Hermitage, he saw The Red Room and the so-called Moroccan Triptych, three paintings from 1912, Window at Tangier, Zorah on the Terrace and Entrance to the Kasbah. Diebenkorn’s response was Recollections of a visit to Leningrad painted in 1965, a painting with as much direct quotation from Matisse as anything he made. The 1966 Los Angeles Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn attended encouraged his engagement with abstraction; there he saw three paintings for the first time: View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both from 1914, and Seated Pink Nude from 1935–36. The openness of Collioure and the thin washed colour of the provisional pink nude are included here as lead-ins to Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series that commenced in 1968. In fact, in comparison to those Matisse works he saw in 1966, some of the Ocean Park paintings can seem formulaic but at their best, where the layering of thin paint conjures effects of observed conditions of light, they appear as worthy successors to the more compositionally radical of Matisse’s works.

There is territory they share as colourists (sharp yellows, an almost limitless repertoire of blues) but they differ too: Matisse (like Bonnard) is extraordinary at establishing chromatic variation while not permitting one colour to be darker or lighter than another— demonstrable in Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon from 1902, where blues, violets greens and pinks are painted with such tonal proximity that most of the painting disappears when photographed in black and white. Diebenkorn never quite gets there, the stronger tonal contrast possibly a consequence of the harsher, flatter North American light. But both can surprise like few other painters—the blues turning into greens and the silver/ pink moon in Matisse’s The Blue Window from 1913, or the punchy orange speech bubble (apparently generated by a pair of scissors) in Diebenkorn’s Still Life with Orange Peel II of 1955–56.

This is a rewarding comparative exhibition, one that extends a “throwing-off-the shackles” Modernism through most of the 20th century as Diebenkorn tests out innovations made in Matisse’s work. More than a generation after the last painting in the show was made, our perspective is necessarily altered. To return to Nicholas Carr’s diagnosis of the pathology of the digital age, what we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization. We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting. If true, we may consider Matisse and Diebenkorn as case studies for the development of such personal knowledge. ❚

“Matisse/Diebenkorn” was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 23, 2016 to January 29, 2017 and will be on exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from March 11 to May 29, 2017.

Martin Pearce makes paintings and drawings. He teaches in the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph.