Interview
with Richard Diebenkorn
Conducted by Susan Larsen
1985 May 1, 2 & 7 and 1987 December 15
The
following oral history transcript is the result of
a tape-recorded interview with Richard Diebenkorn
on May 1, 2 & 7, 1985 and December 15, 1987. The
interview was conducted by Susan Larsen for the Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Richard
Diebenkorn and Susan Larsen have reviewed the transcript
and have made corrections and emendations. The reader
should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript
of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
RD: Richard Diebenkorn
SL: Susan Larsen
Session
1
Interview
with Richard Diebenkorn
Conducted by Susan Larsen
1985 May 1
[Tape 1, side A]
SL:
So, I think we will start at the beginning, and I
just wanted to check certain things that have been
common knowledge, but just to affirm with you. You
were born in Portland?
RD: Yes.
SL:
In 1922?
RD:
Yes.
SL:
And your family had been there a long time or a short
time?
RD:
Short time. They were, my mother was a Californian.
She was born in San Diego. And my father came here
from Cincinnati in nineteen-o-something-or-other.
His business moved him to Portland briefly to start
a new office. They eventually became a West Coast
company. And he got the office going in Portland,
and it took years, I think, and then they moved back
to California, back to San Francisco.
SL:
Is that where they met and got together?
RD:
I think they met in Los Angeles.
SL:
And what sort of business did your father. . . .
RD:
Hotel and restaurant supply company.
SL:
Oh.
RD:
And it was the leading restaurant and hotel supply
company on the West Coast. And what else?
SL:
Okay, that was. . . . I just wondered.
RD:
This [the microphone--Ed.] is close enough?
SL:
I think so. So, your family moved to San Francisco
then in 1924? Is that about right?
RD:
About, yes. '24 or '25. I'm not just certain of the
dates.
SL:
Okay. And you were the only child?
RD:
Yes.
SL:
And did you have a family surrounding you? Cousins
and grandmother and aunts and uncles.
RD:
Grandmother, on my mother's side, and grandfather,
on my father's side. So I. . . . My mother and father
and me. And my grandmother I saw a lot of, especially
during the summer.
SL:
This was Florence Stephens?
RD:
Florence Stephens, yes.
SL:
You've mentioned her. Many people have mentioned her.
She was an important person in your young life, I
gather.
RD:
Extremely.
SL:
She was the one who encouraged your interest in art
and reading and many other things?
RD:
Yes.
SL:
She sounded like an interesting lady. From what I
gather she went back to school in her thirties and
was very active in. . . .
RD:
She became a lawyer, and, well, she was a painter.
There's a painter--I mean, painting in the kitchen
that I'll show you later of hers. She was a poet,
poetess, I guess. Is that a word? No. [laughter]
SL:
Was she very lively, or quiet?
RD:
Very lively. Irish-type disposition, since she was
born in Dublin. She came to this country in the. .
. . She came to San Francisco in about 1870.
SL:
My.
RD:
And lived on Telegraph Hill.
SL:
(chuckles)
RD:
In her later years, she had a radio program in San
Francisco, a book review program.
SL:
Was she involved with new literature, or was it classics?
RD:
Well, new for the time, I guess. She wrote. She wrote
stories and I think she got about a third of them
published. She always had something out with, sweating
out the response in the mail.
SL:
I see.
RD:
What else about her?
SL:
Did she have you writing stories? Drawing, from an
early age?
RD:
Well, it wasn't exactly that she had me doing it,
but she was very appreciative. I think I did the painting
on my own, and I think that in a backhanded way, my
father was important to the beginnings of my drawing,
because I think Richard was totally occupied, and
no trouble at all when he had shirt cardboards to
draw trains, pictures of locomotives on. And so I
really can't remember when I wasn't engaged in that
activity for some part of the day--of drawing.
SL:
That's what you started on, shirt cardboards?
RD:
Shirt cardboards. I remember they were chipboard surface
on one side, that, just, I hated, and the other side
was a smooth white, and that I liked to draw on.
SL:
I know just what you're talking about. So you would
spend the summers with your grandmother and. . . .
For a short period of time, or long period of time.
RD:
Well, the whole summer.
SL:
The whole summer?
RD:
Yes. She had a small house in Woodside, California.
And there was just wild country there then. And so
I was loose in the forest [or, and] the hills with
bow and arrow or whatever.
SL:
Really, oh. What else did you like to do besides painting
and drawing?
RD:
Well, I guess I had a pretty good fantasy life during
those summers, because I remember I carved--a couple
of summers; I must have been eleven and twelve--and
carved swords and made shields, and emblazoned them
with insignia and. . . .
SL:
Just like King Arthur and that kind of thing?
RD:
Sure. Yeah.
SL:
That was also something you read, I gather, too.
RD:
Oh, yes. It just occurred to me, talking about my
grandmother, I wanted to correct something in this
book [Richard Diebenkorn Paintings and Drawings 1943-1976,
catalogue of Albright-Knox exhibition,1976.--Ed.].
They made a very funny mistake. Or a mistake that's
very, very misleading. If I were reading it, I wouldn't
know what to make of this. It says, it's involved
with my grandmother's law activity.
SL:
Is this something that you. . . .
RD:
Oh, here. "Mrs. Stephens had returned to school
at age 35 to study law. . . . during World War II
took on 28 cases defending German-Americans whose
civil rights had been violated, and won them all."
Well, the mistake there is the "II"; it
should be World War I, obviously, and there wasn't
that kind of defense of German-Americans in World
War II, and there was no. . . . I don't think they,
there was any requirement for it, either, that it
was a very serious proposition in World War I, and
she was sympathetic with the underdog.
SL:
Um hmm. It would be more likely the Japanese-Americans
in World War II.
RD:
Yeah, yes.
SL:
Also it didn't make sense if she came to San Francisco
in 1870.
RD:
No.
SL:
I mean, how could she be 35 in World War II?
RD:
Yes, exactly. I thought that came out in a very puzzling
way.
SL:
Thank you! [cookies are offered--Ed.]
RD:
Oh, yes.
SL:
Thank you very much.
Another
voice: Don't let the dogs see the cookies.
RD:
Oh. We have cookies.
SL:
Oh, okay. That's a magic word always with me. Something
I hadn't asked you is what kind, nationality of name
is Diebenkorn?
RD:
Well, I'd always understood it was German, and my
father's grandfather came to this country in the,
during the Civil War. I say that because they were
going to land in New York and they had to go around
the Mississippi, come up the Mississippi River. And
he died going up the Mississippi River, so my grandfather,
who was five, and his mother went to Cincinnati and
she immediately remarried someone named Howard. And
his. . . . Grandfather kept the name Diebenkorn and.
. . . But because of that, really a lot of history
was lost that the. . . .
SL:
Um hmm, the family. . . .
RD:
. . . that that, that my father's, my great-grandfather
would have. . . . My great-grandmother immediately
got involved with a different family and so on. But
then, so it was, all we knew was that it was a German
name, and we knew that history of coming to Cincinnati,
and that was all. But then, Phyllis and I were interested
to find out really for sure, and we, so we went [to]
Europe, and. . . . It was shortly after my father
died that my mother had a friend who was Dutch and
had been born in Holland and told my mother that she
had grown up very close to a community, very small
community named Diebenkorn.
SL:
Ah hah!
RD:
And so my mother informed--she was getting a little
bit on, then, in age--but she informedPhyllis and
me one evening, when we had her for dinner, that "It's
possible that your name is Dutch," that because
of so-and-so who said that. So this sort of threw
us in a quandary and it made us--made me--more than
determined than ever to figure out what. . . . So
we were going to take this trip, and we were--Holland,
Germany, Austria, Italy. First time we had done that
part of Europe, and. . . . I'm making too long a story
of this. But at any rate, we traveled through Holland
and Kroller-Muller Museum and all those treats, and
we just had this gorgeous time. But all the time,
from south of Holland, when we'd stay someplace, I'd
look in the telephone book and. . .
SL:
Did you find any?
RD:
I found all sorts of names that were very much like
it, especially in central, central-eastern Holland.
And Holland is sort of a vertical country, and central
and eastern. And the names would be right except for
one word [means letter--Ed.] here and there. Very,
very close. So then finally, then when we got to the
south, the names changed character and so [I] sort
of gave it up. Well, this isn't true. Oh! Even asked
there about a community of Diebenkorn in, and the
people who should have known, would have known, said
that, "We have no record of anything like that."
So then we went on around the coast into Germany and
I just, I wasn't even, I'd given up the project, and,
but then we went to Hamburg, and we were in the hotel
there, and I passed this lobby and this large telephone
thing--telephone books and girls sitting around answering
questions--and so I went up and looked in the book,
and no names like it [but spelled differently--Ed.]
at all. But there were four Diebenkorns in the. .
. .
SL:
Perfect, just the same?
RD:
Yeah. Yeah, God! And no names like them really either.
And this gave, made my flesh sort of crawl, because
I'd never seen my name other than referring to me
or my family.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
So, well, to make a long story short, I called one,
and the person was very hospitable, had us for tea--I
think it was coffee--and this man, who was my age,
had his son and his wife-to-be, who was an engineer,
and it was all very nice. And they went, they, I guess
the son was there because he and his fiance both spoke
English. So we got to talking about the name, and
they had recalled the--or the man who was my age had
recalled hearing about a great-grandfather who had
gone to America and disappeared.
SL:
Oh, is that right? Fabulous! That must have, it very
likely could be.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. And then they talked about the name and
they said that the name originated in Sweden. It was
in a dialect. The name meant the grain stacked in
the shape of a house. You know, when you see. . .
This is a Diebenkorn, but it was spelled different,
but I mean, you know, it was essentially. . . .
SL:
Very interesting.
RD:
And these, they were farmers, the Diebenkorns, and
they came in the, I guess they were at least 17th
century or late 16th. It was when Sweden was occuping
the northern part of Germany, Prussia, after the Thirty
Years War, I guess. At any rate, they came down there
about that time, and in [Mecklenberg]. I'm really
answering your question, aren't I?
SL:
That's fine.
RD:
Then some of them moved, or one branch of the family
moved from Mecklenberg to Hamburg, and they in Hamburg--the
people we were talking to--said that there are a lot
of Diebenkorns in Mecklenberg, whereas there are just
very few, just this single branch of the family in
Hamburg. So the mysterywas cleared up once and for
all.
SL:
That's great.
RD:
I don't know about my mother's friend who had the
Dutch. . . .
SL:
Maybe she had the German Mecklenberg. . . .
RD:
And I had always understood that Diebenkorn meant
cornfield, but apparently the derivations didn't.
. . .
SL:
Much better. (chuckles) I looked up at that little
house-like thing up there. It's sort of like a, almost
like a. . . . Oops. [referring to dog?--Ed.]
RD:
But in the. . . . I had told the photographer, Leo
[Holub] . . . . Do you know him?
SL:
No, I don't.
RD:
Oh. He's from Northern California, photography. He's
very, very good one. Worked for Stanford for a long
time. Bruce, no! [speaking to dog--Ed.]
[Break
in taping]
SL:
So, well. So that cleared up some of the mysteries,
there. So, as a child in school, were you focused
on art, or did you have other things that were more
central to your growing-up time?
RD:
Well, the art was, for me, was always something I
did privately. During school I never, I avoided art
classes because just to look in at high school, to
look in and see what was going on just didn't interest
me at all. It wasn't art that I was interested in;
it was drawing and painting, which I had really not
made a real, I had no real understanding of drawing
and painting as art. I have an understanding of drawing
and painting in terms of this activity of mine, you
see.
SL:
Um hmm. Did you, had you gone to museums at that point,
and had a sense of what was perhaps different than
craft kinds of things?
RD:
Well, yes. [hesitant--Ed.] My grandmother took me.
I remember she took me to the Van Gogh show in, at
the Palace, California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
and that must have been around 1934, somewhere in
there.
SL:
Yes, the one that came from the Museum of Modern Art?/
RD:
I think it was. . . . Possibly. But my impression
is that it was. . . . Was that about that time?
SL:
I think it was. I mean, I could be wrong. We could
look up and find out.
RD:
It could have been that show, then. What occurs to
me in regard to that--I'll get off the track for a
moment--as a child going to that show with my grandmother,
it was fun. Paintings--I don't know if I really got
with it, but it was a memorable day. And the thing
that interested me, that is very fresh in my recollection,
were the groups of people being taken through that
exhibition. Groups of--with a guide, who would be
speaking--twenty to thirty people, as we see today,
and. . . .
SL:
How did you feel about that?
RD:
The people were laughing--in most of the groups--laughing
at the pictures! And I remember one--and I remember
this rather clearly too--I listened to one of the
men, one of the guides talking to the group, and he
was contributing to the fun and games about this crazy
painting that was on the wall!
SL:
Really!
RD:
Yes! As late as. . . . So when the rush to print postcards,
books, reproductions, you know, framed pictures, vanGogh's
sunflowers for everybody's house, when that occurred--you
know, it must have happened very shortly after that.
. . .
SL:
Yes.
RD:
. . . because the public at that time clearly was
very perplexed by. . . .
SL:
What did your grandmother think about the show?
RD:
She was interested. When you see her picture in the,
she was, did some oil painting, but mostly worked
in watercolor, and you'll see that it's pretty traditional
watercolor.
SL:
But so she presented it to you in a positive way?
RD:
So I think it was. . . . Yeah, this was something
to stimulate both of us.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
And I'm sure it did [stimulate--Ed.] her, and, because
she wasn't laughing with. . . .
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
And I really kind of forget what my responses were
to the pictures themselves.
SL:
They could seem rather. . . . I would think they might
seem very bright and overwhelming to someone who hadn't
seen them.
RD:
Oh yes, and I think we forget, we take for granted
the kind of distortion that the Expressionists, the
expressionist kind of distortion. This is something
we assume now, and I think that that recently those
assumptions were not, one did not exaggerate or distort.
And in line with that, I recall seeing Cezanne for
the first time, and it was I think shortly before
I went to college, actually. I read Somerset Maugham's
The Moon and Sixpence, and at one point, I remember,
the artist's name, the Gauguin character that was
named. . . . Strickland! Charles Strickland. You read
it.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
And there was a short description of his painting,
which was a little bit like the painter,
Paul
Cezanne.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
Well, I was involved with this story, and then so
I wanted to have some idea what Charles Strickland's
painting was like, so I went to the library and got
an art book and, which. . . . I mean, it was the only
one in a large library, black and white reproductions
of Cezanne's pictures. And it was really quite a shock
to me!
SL:
It was.
RD:
The crazy sort of [barenness, bareness] spareness,
and the distortions just hit me very hard. There were
tabletops where I felt apples should roll off the.
. . . And buildings with skewed verticals and horizontals
and backgrounds that. . . . A horizon-line or floor-line
which came in from one side at this level and popped
out at a different level, and. . . . Very disquieting,
shocking, for me. Because my discipline, as a teenager,
had been strictly drawing as craft in terms of accurate
rendition of what's out there, all the logic of how
things sit in relation to their context, and. . .
.
SL:
You had been exposed to things like the work of Howard
Pyle? And N.C. Wyeth?
RD:
Yes.
SL:
Is it at this point that you were looking at things
like that?
RD:
Yeah, I think Pyle and Wyeth came in, oh, from about
age ten onward. On until. . . .
SL:
Did you see them in books, or. . . .
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
Did you see them in books?
RD:
Oh, in books, yeah.
SL:
There weren't any original drawings around?
RD:
I think there weren't any around then. I don't think
there was ever an exhibition of them. They were, it
was a. . . . Scribner's did a series of children's
classics: Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and most of
these books were illustrated by Wyeth. And then Howard
Pyle illustrated--and I think did the writing too,
in archaic style, and the drawings--and illustrated
these books, a whole series on Arthurian legends.
And the drawings related to--they were somewhat stylized--but
related to German 16th-century drawing: Durer, Hans
Baldung.
SL:
Which is, really a somewhat fantastic aspect, versus
the more narrative, realist thing.
RD:
Yes!
SL:
It's as though you have both of those strains going
on, simultaneously.
RD:
Um hmm, yeah. So they, and then. . . . Oh! Pyle did
his marvelous book, the only one that I still have
left, that I've hung onto through the years, and that
was [Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates], and. . . . I'm
sure that both Wyeth and Pyle had a great influence
on some of the good directors, movie directors, who
were after a, realist directors: Ford, who I think
really leaned heavily on, well, Remington, but also
on Wyeth. You can just feel that. And then Pyle also.
Because there was no fantasy in the pirates thing.
Pirates were cool, rough, bad, you know. And deadly.
[said with a smile--Ed.] And there was no. . . .
SL:
Not heroes.
RD:
No romanticizing. There was in a sense, because, a
romanticizing, essentially it's a romantic thing,
but no glossing, no kidding.
SL:
So it was a realist mode in a way.
RD:
Yeah, yeah.
SL:
In a way, you have an intersection of things that
are very basically American in their roots in art.
. . .
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
. . . and other than this encounter with a few things
that are very European, and an acknowledgement, it
seems, of the difference that there was there.
RD:
With, in so far that we've gone, where do you find
the European in. . . ?
SL:
Well, the van Gogh and the Cezanne and the. . . .
RD:
Oh yes, yeah.
SL:
. . . the distortions that you see there.
RD:
Well, the van Gogh was early.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
The Cezanne, though--and that's where I got off the
track, I think--the Cezanne pictures. . . There came
a change--immediately--for me on looking at these.
SL: Really? You could understand it?
RD:
Yeah. These things hit me very, very hard. I didn't
know what to make of them. A little bit repellent
even. But I'm, it's such a lesson to me, having had
this experience. . . .
[Tape
1, side B]
RD:
. . . not really gotten into the taste, into our culture's
taste, at any rate, middle-class America. When I was
a teenager, Cezanne was certainly established in cultural.
. . .
SL:
But he wasn't a household word, or. . . .
RD:
No, no. And I had looked, because of my fascination
with drawing and painting, I was just interested in
drawing and painting wherever I saw it, and so I wasn't
exactly that naive.
SL:
Did you just pick this up on your own? You found the
book and you looked at it and you realized there was
something to it?
RD:
I went to the library and, just to find out who Charles
Strickland's paintings looked like.
SL:
Ah hah!
RD:
And so there was, there was the answer. But the lesson
for me, the thing that I've tried to communicate to
some younger people here and there--and they don't,
I can tell they don't get it--it's been a long time
since you could shock anybody by showing them a Cezanne
or Van Gogh. . . .
SL:
But when you saw this and it disturbed you, I mean,
did you worry over it or did you start immediately
to try to take it apart and find out what was going
on, and how did it make you feel about what you were
doing?
RD:
Oh, I looked at these pictures a lot and puzzled.
I didn't immediately go into my work. Because the
next influence that came along in painting was--let's
see, there was an interim, the longest time in my
whole life that I didn't do any artwork, I mean, drawing
or painting, was my first two years at Stanford. And
my father had sent me there to be a professional lawyer,
doctor, something. And so it wasn't until I enlisted
in the military, but still stayed in college, that
I began to look around away from what I had been put
in school for, which got to boring me quite a bit.
SL:
You weren't. . . . Were you, as you left high school,
had you thought of going into art for a career, or
avocation?
RD:
Well, I thought all along that I'd be a, I wanted
to be an artist, which meant--I think maybe it says
in the book commercial artist or something. I was
emphatic that I was going to continue, or that was
my, what I wanted to do.
SL:
You expressed that, you felt that?
RD:
Yeah. And I'm sure that saying this at age twelve,
my father would smile; saying it at age seventeen,
I think he was starting to get nervous. (laughter)
SL:
Then changed your mind, huh?
RD:
And it was assumed all along in my teenage years that
I'd be going to Stanford and, but of course I was
going for a serious reasons; I wasn't going there
to become an artist.
SL:
Did you know any artists, or did your family know
any artists? Or was it. . . .
RD:
Just my grandmother.
SL:
So it was basically. . . . Did they think of it as
more an avocational thing to do?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm. And I can remember my father telling
me at some point, about the time he started getting
nervous, when I was getting older and older and still
wanting to be an artist, well, I remember a couple
of talks where he would say, "You know, this
drawing and painting thing is just a fine avocation,
and I think you're in an enviable position to have
some, to have this to do in your life as well as what
you really do with your life." (both chuckle)
SL:
Which is not unusual. A lot of parents, I would think,
would. . . . But it is unusual for someone to have
an interest, develop it, stick with it, and express
it that directly at that age.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
That seems to be very unusual.
RD:
Yes.
SL:
Especially in the absence of a context that is right
there, that's supporting it.
RD:
Um hmm, um hmm. I never. . . . Look, see, with my
own children, with children of friends that, of these
kids who are of course marvelous artists, and then
that time comes around just about puberty and all
this falls away. They become directed in a totally
different way. And people sort of grow up, beyond
being artists, and I feel fortunate that I didn't
grow up--in that sense, or maybe some other sense
too! (chuckles)
SL:
Well, that's quite remarkable. Were there art courses
at Stanford that you even looked into?
RD:
No, that's where we were. When I, after I had joined
the Marine Corps, still at Stanford. I knew I wasn't
going to be there in school too long, and so I think
I took a little advantage of my father and I enrolled
in some art courses and proceeded to neglect courses
like political science and economics--in fact I got
some big fat flunks in those. And of course my father
was then nervous, but here was his boy who was. .
. .
SL:
Going to the war, probably.
RD:
. . . going to be in the war, and, okay, so he became
permissive at this point, and so I took further advantage
and probably further and further art courses, until
that was just about all I was taking. (laughter)
SL:
Did you. . . . But you hadn't found them that interesting
in high school, though. Was it a different kind of
thing in college?
RD:
Well, in high school, I guess I, for one thing I was
probably a little intimidated. I can remember standing
in the doorway of the art studio at Lowell High School
and looking in, and seeing these people busily working,
professionally, and this was, what they were doing
wasn't at all like the sort of cramped illustrative
thing that I was, did at home. They were doing something
broad and essentially meaningless to me, kind of oversimplified
figure drawings, Diego Rivera influence, and I think
I told somebody or other in an interview that there
were lots of drawings of big pieces of hemp rope that
would have come from Mexican muralists, or dock, longshoreman,
social commentary murals, where there were all these
big coils of heavy. . . .
SL:
Even Stuart Davis has a few of those.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. So this, to draw a piece, to copy a piece
of--or an exaggerated somehow in the way they did--piece
of rope just meant nothing to me, so I stayed away.
But at Stanford it was something different. They had
survey courses, and they had a very limited masters
program, I think only in art history. But they had
studio courses: small, academic, I think you might
say, although the people I encountered were good and
became lasting friends, Dan Mendelowitz.
SL:
You studied with Mendelowitz there?
RD:
Mendelowitz, Dan Mendelowitz.
SL:
Uh huh. He was the art history professor?
RD:
He was one of them; there were three. A man named
Farmer, and a Russian emigre, Victor Arnautoff, who
was a fascinating man.
SL:
And he taught. . . ?
RD:
He taught oil painting. Dan--I didn't have much to
do with Farmer--Dan Mendelowitz taught watercolor.
And Dan and I became very close friends and [I--Ed.]
continued to see him through the years. He died a
couple a years ago.
SL:
I think a lot of us know him for his book on American
art, which. . . .
RD:
Oh, you know. . . .
SL:
Oh sure. Used the book for years.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
I gather a bit from what other people have written
that he was very interested in the workof Dove and
the early American modernists as well as some of the
European work as well.
RD:
Well, I think he was, of any contemporary work, he
was--what's the word I want?--that the American moderns
were acceptable to him. At that time, the European
modernism was really a kind of a thorn in Dan's side.
And he, in his, he did marvelous lectures with his
survey course, of slides and so astute, but then he'd
come to modernism and show Picasso or Matisse--or
both--and--of course both--and he couldn't resist
making comments that would bring down the house in
the little theater there. And he was funny and. .
. .
SL:
So it discouraged further interest.
RD:
. . . and then he'd sincerely, in such a sincere way,
he would defend Matisse and his patterns and what
not. "And you know, there's nothing really, nothing
wrong with this. It's like a nice necktie. (laughter)
A nicely patterned necktie."
SL:
Goodness.
RD:
I would never have repeated this story while he was
alive, because I think he, he probably. . . .
SL:
Did he change his mind in later years? He must have.
RD:
Well, I don't know when he changed his mind. Either
he repressed all this that he said, or cringed whenever
he thought of it. Where were we?
SL:
You were at Stanford taking from a liberal group of
courses.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
So then did you find that the kind of work and background
that you brought into this situation, how did that
fare in this climate? And of work that you were doing?
RD:
Well, very well, because they gave me great freedom
at Stanford and I. . . What I haven't said yet, referred
to yet, is Edward Hopper, who. . . . There was the
Cezanne thing, but then I was introduced--or perhaps
I knew Hopper a little bit when I came there--but
there, with Dan's courses, his photographic slides
and. . . . [phone rings] That [isn't supposed to]
ring.
SL:
That's okay. I'll just turn it off.
[Break
in taping]
SL:
So, let's see, we were at Stanford and I was asking
you, the kind of work that you were doing when you
came, or the kind of work that you'd done prior to
entering college, how that transfered itself into
that situation?
RD:
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, so here was Hopper influence,
very strong. I was absolutely, very different response
from the Cezanne black-and-white reproductions. Here,
Mendelowitz thought Hopper was great. Sloan--or not
Sloan, but--Reginald Marsh was his, he had studied
and that was his god. Not mine--Hopper, but he also
loved Hopper and so I was really smitten, love. I
mean it wasn't this puzzling thing as with Cezanne.
So I embraced Hopper completely, and as you can tell
by the reproduction here in the book. . . .
SL:
This.
RD:
I of course had to go outside and paint; everyone
else painted in the studio, but I was allowed to get
in my car and find subjects to work with, and then
I would just bring in the pictures for criticism.
So I was free to combine some of the influences that
are being. . . . There wasn't this kind of thing at
Stanford that there had been at high school, the Mexican
muralists or the social. . . . Actually it was a bit
more modern at high school. (chuckles)
SL:
Ah. This is Palo Alto Circle, 1943? That's the one
you're talking about?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
In terms of what you've admired of Hopper, was it
the. . . . Hopper was both a painter of locations
and moods and feelings and a painter of figures.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And was there an aspect of that appealed to you more
than others? You weren't, or were you going out seeking
interesting views?
RD:
I think it was the landscape mainly. The figures seemed
then extremely stiff to me. And of course I realize
now that that stiffness is part of him, part of what
he saying about the people. But that didn't really
get to me then. They were simply a bit too stiff,
so I preferred the pure, I guess, I was going to say
landscape, but cityscape, and. . . .
SL:
This is a very formal painting. This is arranged in
a quite-knowing overlapping way.
RD:
Huh, well, actually. . . . I know that knowing doesn't
have to be right on the surface of things--it wasn't.
I mean, I liked the look of that scene, and I sat
there and put it down on the canvas. There was no
formal, conscious formal attempt.
SL:
And it wasn't the social scene aspect of that era
that interested you at all at that point?
RD:
No, no. And I think with Hopper, the use of light
and shade and the atmosphere, that kind of drenched,
saturated with mood, and its kind of austerity, it
was the kind of work that just seemed made for me.
I mean, it was just, you know, I looked at it and
it was mine, which was very different from most of
the other, all of the other artists I. . . .
SL:
It's marvelous; that's proved out over time, too,
in a way that's quite surprising, you know, the initial
grasp that this is yours. . . .
RD:
Yes.
SL:
. . . and all of the subsequent periods of your. .
. . There's still an essence of that somewhere, [around
it all]. Quite intriguing. Did you. . . . From what
you described previously, it seemed that you were
drawing and doing watercolor painting. Now had you
switched to oil painting at this point? And had to
master that whole medium? Or had you been working
in that way before?
RD:
I was working in both ways. I was signed up with Arnautoff
and Mendelowitz, and one day I'd do watercolors; another
day, as the spirit moved me, and. . . . I never had
great problems with oil paint. The watercolor medium
was transparent watercolor, which, looking back, it
seems--well, Dan was a watercolorist, in that Homer
tradition, but to start people out, that seems a little
bit wrong to me, to start people out with a very difficult,
with a difficult medium like that,and oil paint or
gouache paint is pretty forthright, but watercolor
is, requires so much kind of understanding of the
medium in a way that the others--of course require
their understanding too--but there's so much kind
of skill involved in things that one should know that
one can't talk of watercolor in the sense that one
wants to really follow this painting through, because
if you do, you start to make changes, and then it's
just, it's not as great. And that seems wrong to me
for. . . . I don't know why I'm off on this.
SL:
Oh, that's okay.
RD:
It doesn't seem quite right for a student to. . .
.
SL:
Um hmm, to have to tackle the most difficult thing
right off.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. One should have a medium that lends itself
to digging in, I would think.
SL:
So there you were enjoying all of this wonderful experience
and the war was right over your shoulder, and you
were already enlisted? How was it that you were able
to go to school and. . . .
RD:
Well, they had a program, it was called the V-12 program,
a navy program, and my branch of it was Marines. And
the idea was that, these people came to colleges and
recruited the students, and I was assured by the Marine
Corps that I would stay in Stanford until I graduated,
and then I would go on into active service. And maybe
they did mean that, maybe they weren't lying, but
I, there were some disasters in the Marines, and so
they started calling up their reserves a lot sooner
than they intended. I guess that's giving them the
benefit of the doubt. (laughter) But at any rate,
I only stayed at Stanford one quarter--maybe a quarter
and a half after I actually signed up. But I was not
in uniform at Stanford. And then. . . . Should I go
on to UC?
SL:
Yeah. I was also interested though, this was about
the time that you married Mrs. Diebenkorn, Phyllis?
RD:
Yeah, I, we married when I left. . . . Well, a couple
of weeks before I went to UC Berkeley.
SL:
I remember you told me--it was years ago--about how
you had broken your leg or something, and she had
come to visit you in a hospital. Am I remembering
this correctly, or. . .
RD:
No, you're not.
SL:
No.
RD:
She had appendicitis and I visited her.
SL:
Oh, okay, all right.
RD:
And maybe the accident to me, I had an accident in
my freshman year at Stanford--I fell out of a window--but
I didn't know her then.
SL:
I've got it all turned around I think.
RD:
Yeah, well. (chuckles)
SL:
So you two met each other very young and were. . .
.
RD:
Yeah, my last. . . . I guess I had met her once before
but--earlier, a year earlier--that she had been away
from school for several quarters and then she came
back and during my last quarter I met her then. And
so then we got married when I left Stanford and when,
after I actually, I had, when I was married, I had
my orders to be on active duty at University of California.
SL:
That must have been hard. My goodness. All of these
rapid changes and. . .
RD:
Oh yes, yeah.
SL:
. . . desire to be at home, just when you have to
go and. . . .
RD:
So, at, I saw her on weekends, when I was at Callahan
Hall, which was International House at UC, Berkeley.
SL:
Was she also an art student?
RD:
No, she was American literature, English and American
literature, her major at Stanford, and later on, psychology,
when she went back to school, much, after the war.
SL:
Okay. And while you were going, was she in school
with you?
RD:
At Stanford. But she wasn't in school. She went to
work as a draftsman for the, [I think] at Fort, Fort
something or other in San Francisco?
SL:
As a draftsman?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
So she could draw as well?
RD:
Yeah. In her last, in that quarter at Stanford when
we met, she was taking drafting, I guess with the
Navy there.
SL:
My!
RD:
It was a Navy-sponsored course at Stanford. So she
was a qualified draftsman at the time we were married.
So then she proceeded to continue that activity while
I was in the service.
SL:
That's an interesting accomplishment for someone in
literature. (chuckles)
RD:
Yeah. Well, but I think her big job was when she went
out to a troop ship that, or a ship that was, had
just come in, I guess, a troop ship, and it was going
to be converted into a hospital ship, or something,
something like that, and she was assigned the whole
latrine system. (laughter) And so she, for about six
months, all she drew was positioned latrines, and
positioning, and. . . . (more laughter)
SL:
Yeah, I guess in time of war you do what you have
to do.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
So in the summer of '43, then, you were in the Marine
Corps officer training, and then you went to Berkeley,
and you were transfered to Berkeley?
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And you, again, though, in, you were being trained
to do, what? Maps or some kind. . . .
RD:
No, that comes later. No, I was in regular OCS, Officer
Training [Officer Candidate School--Ed.]
RD:
And I was in uniform and. . . . You know, shall I
just proceed?
SL:
Please do, yes.
RD:
It was a Marine Corps unit at, along with lots of
Navy. There was a Marine Corps sergeant and there
was a commandant, a captain. And so we took classes,
although we got up very early and did all sorts of
exercises and ran all the. . . . There were about
35 of us that ran all over the campus in the, every
morning. And we got weekends off. And what the majors
were, I mean, what people specialized in, had to do
somewhat with what they had done at Stanford. Although
in some cases, it was kind of terrible, and I do,
I recall this, standing in line at, the first day,
and, with a sergeant and the captain behind a desk
reassigning, reassigning one's major, so that. . .
. And I'm standing in this line and a business major
would become a physics major, and you'd see these
people clap their hands to their foreheads, and say,
"Oh, my god!"
SL:
Oh, my. "I'm not going to do that," huh?
RD:
So just about everybody was being changed, was having
their central activity changed, and then they came
to me. And they were going by lists, so if you were,
if you were a biology major, well, the sergeant would
go down the list, "Duh, duh, duh, biology."
And then there would be a paralleling column. Well,
a biologists becomes a. . . .
SL:
Hospital corpsman, or something?
RD:
Something like that. And so he went down the list
and he didn't find any art. So he said, "Well,
we'll keep you in art." (laughs) Which was. .
. .
SL:
Great!
RD:
So I was the only person in this quite large art department
there, as opposed to the really small one at Stanford.
SL:
And that's where you ran into Erle Loran?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And Worth Ryder?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm, yeah. And Eugene Neuhaus. And I was
the only art student in uniform. And I drew and painted.
. . .
SL:
Had. . . . At that point was Erle Loran teaching the
kind of thing he wrote in his book on Cezanne?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
The composition?
RD:
Yeah, uh huh.
SL:
And he had been, I gather, a Hans Hoffman student?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm. [Exactly].
SL:
And that sounded somewhat like what Hoffman taught
back east as well.
RD:
Exactly.
SL:
And was that something that you had, I mean, you had
contact with?
RD:
I had had no contact with it before. His book wasn't,
he was writing the book. It was well known that Erle
Loran had a book that was going to come out next year.
And when I saw the book--and I still think it's an
impressive book--but there were no surprises for me,
because I'd had it all in the, in his courses. So
the book was, and the teaching were one and the same.
And so then the Cezanne thing picked up again.
SL:
Yes. And it renewed some of those interests. . . .
RD:
Oh, absolutely! And so then I fell really into this.
SL:
Did you embrace it, or were you still wondering about
it, or. . . .
RD:
Oh absolutely! And Cezanne was in a somewhat. . .
.
End
Tape 1
[Tape
2, side A] [Note: Side B not recorded]
SL:
So he was teaching, then painting, and using the Cezanne
structures as an adjunct to the painting course, or.
. . .
RD:
Let's see, did I have a painting course from him?
I'm not sure. I think it was mostly drawing from him.
I think it was with Worth Ryder that I did painting.
But then, then I worked things out so that I could
paint outside, like [I _____, name?]. And Loran was
very resistant at first to that, but then he let me
do it. So I'd bring my work in and talk to him in
his office, and that was fun.
SL:
I would think it would be.
RD:
We argued, and. . . .
SL:
Oh, you did. What did you argue about?
RD:
Well, I had resistance to him. He was a pretty. .
. . Well, he was didactic, he was. . . .
SL:
He was?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Did he tell you what to do?
RD:
Well, he was. . . .
SL:
How to do it?
RD:
Well, he would talk about composition exclusively,
and he would, he would make pronouncements that sometimes
I just couldn't accept. [phone rings] Dammit!
[Break
in taping]
RD:
Oh yeah.
SL:
What is. . . . You were out painting and discovering
your own subjects and bringing the paintings back?
RD:
Well, he had. . . . I don't, I'm not putting him down
when I say this, but he had really ironclad theory,
primarily--almost exclusively--based on Cezanne. And
there were things that I just had to challenge--small--when
he'd make his sweeping pronouncements.
SL:
What was it that you wanted in your work that perhaps
didn't fit his formula?
RD:
I just suspected that you were going to ask when I
said that there were things that I took exception
[to--Ed.].
SL:
(chuckles)
RD:
I think that I. . . . I don't. . . . We had several
almost-arguments. But, the, I only remember the subject
of one. . . . There was a Cezanne reproduction that
he brought out for some reason or other which had,
it was back to the apples falling off the table. There
was this tilted top, and there was something that
he wanted me to do in my painting that, he wanted
me to show rooftop or something or other and not have
it move out into depth where it would go off into
a tunnel or something, get lost to the surface. And
he brought out, I guess he brought out this reproduction,
[the, Cezanne's] illustration of this tabletop that
came up and this was kind of distortion, I, that,
not exactly in the picture, but. . . . Theoretically
this was not right somehow that one made this kind
of, this kind of tampering with the logic of gravity,
and this was something that was, that I wasn't going
to accept. So that's the only, that's the only. .
.
SL:
Did you feel that perhaps you had some allegiance
to what things really, what nature did, that you could
observe, rather than a formula that would be followed?
RD:
I think so, yeah.
SL:
Because there's always a great deal of nature in Cezanne,
and Cezanne made his negotiations with what he saw.
RD:
Exactly, sure.
SL:
And he would be. . . .
RD:
And they were a bit in conflict with mine so far,
and. . . .
SL:
Also maybe to do justice to him, and to his way of.
. . . You'd have to find your own way of doing it.
RD:
I think so. Yes.
SL:
One can be inspired but not maybe imitate.
RD:
Exactly.
SL:
Was there any talk of Hoffman and what Hoffman was
doing back in New York, or was this sort of implied?
RD:
A little bit. I wasn't, I heard the name, of course,
there, but nobody was really saying I'm presenting
Hoffman's theories. So it was, Hoffman was just a
name when I, at that time, when I was at UC. I'm trying
to think what else would have happened there in the
art way.
SL:
Because Hoffman did teach there briefly, in what,
'31 was it?
RD:
Yeah, yeah. I think it was '30--'30, '31, somewhere
in there. It had an enormous impact on, I guess, Loran
and John Haley and Worth Ryder, [a, the] sculptor.
I can't remember.
SL:
But already in the world, surrealism was rearing its
presence. . . .
RD:
Yes, it was.
SL:
. . . and things were changing, and yet that wasn't
much in the air yet at that point?
RD:
Well, as I recall, there was--now I'm not certain
of this--but I kind of that surrealism had a kind
of bad name at UC with all that. . . . It was. . .
. I'm not certain what place surrealism did have.
SL:
Yeah, I know. . . . Among, at least in the later thirties,
people who admired the more cubist/constructivist
tradition coming out of Cezanne tended--some of them,
at least in New York that I know of, Gallatin, Morris,
those people--tended to truly disapprove of especially
the more realistic types of surrealism.
RD:
Um hmm, yeah.
SL:
And Miro was perhaps as far as they would go in that
direction.
RD:
That's right, yes. And [Masson].
SL:
They felt it didn't have plasticity.
RD:
[Ernst], they would accept.
SL:
No, these people wouldn't have accepted Ernst.
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
I mean, these people I talked to wouldn't have accepted
Ernst either, but of course the Guggenheim group and
Pollock and those people of course did.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
So then you were reassigned to Washington, D.C., area?
RD:
First I went to South Carolina to boot camp. No art
there. (chuckles) Just a lot of splashing around in
swamps and. . . . That was mercifully short, boot
camp tour. Then to North Carolina, Camp Lejune, which
corresponded to Camp Pendleton in the west--big, the
biggest Marine Corps base--and there my unit, well,
we were put through the paces, given further training
and awaiting. . .
SL:
Did you feel that you were. . . .
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
Did you feel you were about to go to the front?
RD:
Well, no, not yet. We were awaiting the official OCS,
the real OCS, which was, is, took place at Quantico,
Virginia. So North Carolina was--well, the word boondocks
originated there. And so I was there for, oh, four
months, something like that. And then, then to Quantico.
And that was, oh well, that was a tough one. That's
when I got kicked out of OCS.
SL:
What did you do or not do?
RD:
Well, I did some kind of dumb things. I had an argument
of. . . . Dumb thing. I. . . . Shall I go into detail
like this, or. . . .
SL:
It's interesting, but it doesn't. . . . If you don't
want to, it's your choice.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
I think it means Officer Candidate School.
RD:
Yeah, that's right. Well, I guess the worse thing
I did was I was leading my platoon and we came to
this, it was, each person had a turn leading the platoon,
each person in the platoon, so I was platoon leader
for this problem of bringing my platoon through a
swamp and arriving at what I found was a little fortified
situation with a Japanese flag sticking up there.
And, well, I'm making myself the hero here, but this
was one of the reasons why I got kicked out of OCS.
I had my platoon be very careful, lay low, and I'm
very, very cautious about this thing, because I thought
that the thing was probably booby-trapped.
SL:
Sure.
RD:
And I forget how, exactly how it worked out, but somebody
sneaked in and tossed a grenade in and presumably
blew up the thing, but it was taken, the position
was taken very unspectacularly, and the sargeant was
absolutely furious because I didn't show any Marine
Corps spirit.
SL:
Oh. (laughs)
RD:
That I should have moved right in there, and I should
have, I should have smashed the flag, and I just couldn't
behave right at all.
SL:
Oh my.
RD:
And I just blew up, because I was sure, and I. . .
.
SL:
Oh. You told him off?
RD:
I told him off! And maybe this was another test. Maybe
it's subtler than I think. Maybe they were testing
my, could I, could I stand there and take what the
sergeant told me.
SL:
That's when you showed the Marine Corps spirit, right?
RD:
Uh, yeah. I should have just stood at attention and
said, "Yes, sir." Maybe it was all a rather
complex test, but I fell the other way, and so! That
had repercussions, and then a week later I dropped
my rifle at a parade in a ceremony where the commandant
of the Marine Corp was present. And so I found myself
kicked out.
SL:
Did you have great aspirations that you were going
to succeed? Did it bother you at all?
RD:
It didn't, somehow it didn't bother me very much.
And in my recollection (chuckles), the thing that
bothered me the most was that I had been fitted for
my uniform, my officer's uniform. We all had gone
to this tailor one day. And there were these marvelous
short coats that the Marine Corps officers, a lot
of them, wore. They were camel's hair and they are
absolutely beautiful. They were a little short of
the knee and really, really something. No enlisted
man got close to one of those. And I had, was fitted
for that. And I recall that this was my big sadness,
that I wasn't. . . .
SL:
That you weren't going to get your coat?
RD:
. . . going to get my coat. (laughter)
SL:
Maybe it saved your life too, not to get the coat.
RD:
Yeah. Well, I'll try and be a little faster.
SL:
Oh, that's okay. So you apparently though were able
to go to Washington, in and out of Washington at some
point in this time?
RD:
Yeah, well, this was a very different thing that I
went into at this point, because everything had been
programmed for me previously--I mean, I was in OCS--and
suddenly I was to be an enlisted man, and plenty of
those there, different barracks and. . . Well, I was
still in my barracks--I hadn't moved out yet, in OCS--and.
. . . Some of this I've told, and maybe it's in that
book, I don't know, but at any rate, around Christmas
I did a lot of drawings of a couple of officers and
the sargeants. I did one drawing and so then they
all wanted these drawings to send home for Christmas.
SL:
Sure.
RD:
And so I did these very controlled, and I think pretty
good portraits. I guess they stylistically are. .
. . I think they were kind of Holbein-derived.
SL:
Oh, they're nice. I'll bet they were beautiful.
RD:
I think some of them were pretty good. But at any
rate, one sargeant was especially interested in what
was going to happen to me, because he felt gratitude
that I'd just given him this drawing to send to his
mother, and he talked to the commanding officer, and
so I had an interview with the commanding officer,
and he said, "Well, I'm sending you to the photographic
section here, because I think that with your drawing
abilities they can use you over there. So I was transferred
to the photographic section which was primarily Disney,
Walt, the Disney people.
SL:
Really! Oh!
RD:
Yeah. Because the photographers were off in the Pacific,
the Disney people were doing maps, animated maps,
to. . . .
SL:
Oh, I see. They had special skills that suited that
kind of map-making.
RD:
Um hmm. So these were training films, and [I] played
with an animated map to show how positions were taken.
SL:
Yeah, um hmm.
RD:
So that's what I was assigned to do. And so I made
some friends there, right away. It was a jolly group.
And I didn't have their kind of skills at all, but.
. . . So I got less and less to do. Each big map wash
that I tried to make and then there'd be a big bubble
or blob in it every time, and I just couldn't do that
kind of thing. Well, I would get left fewer and fewer
assignments, and finally I found myself with art materials
and. . . .
SL:
Free time, huh?
RD:
. . . free time. (laughs) So that went on for quite
a while. But in the meantime, on weekends I was able
to, Quantico was something like 30 miles from Washington,
D.C. and Phyllis was living in, across the river from
Washington. I can't. . . .
SL:
So she sort of traveled around the country?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
[Typical] story then, moving [one, then], my goodness.
RD:
She stayed with friends in Williamsburg, I think,
while I was in North Carolina, and then she moved
to. . . . I can't think of the old city across the
river from the. . . . It's in Virginia. Well, at any
rate, we had a house and I was there on the weekends.
But then we went to the museums, all the time. Just
feasted--on the National Gallery and Phillips Memorial
Gallery and Corcoran and. . . .
SL:
I gather the Phillips was a special favorite, from
things I've read?
RD:
Yeah. It was, then it had. . . . It's continually
expanding. I think they expanded again for the second
time just recently. But then it was simply a big--I
guess one would call it a mansion--big old house,
furnished, and somehow survived the public trooping
through all the time. But there were the original
rugs on the floor, the original furniture, and one
was made to, the hospitality was extended, especially
to servicemen, and. . . .
SL:
At that point they had the. . . .
RD:
. . . one could smoke and sit in the rooms and talk
and look, and. . . .
SL:
A very different museum style than today?
RD:
Very different, yes.
SL:
They were rich then in the Impressionist, post-Impressionist,
and American paintings?
RD:
Um hmm, yeah. Yeah, post-Impressionist, their strongest
suit. Well, Bonnard. And then American modern.
SL:
Um hmm. Do you remember things that were particularly
interesting?
RD:
Let's see. The Matisse, the nude on the couch in the
room and the sun, out the window.
SL:
Interior Nice is it?
RD:
No, no, this was before Nice. Paris Roux something
or other Ste. Michel, I think.
SL:
Ah, is it this one?
RD:
Yeah. [The Studio, St. Michel, 1916, page 6, fig.
3]
SL:
Okay. So The Studio Que Ste. Michelle. 1916.
RD:
Yeah. So that was the big, that was the big one for
me. And I did a lot of looking at that. Other things.
Well, there were. . . .
SL:
Dove, you may have. Did he have a lot of Dove?
RD:
Dove? Dove.
SL:
Was there any. . . . Did you have any affinity for
those, or. . . .
RD:
Some. I guess of that group, Dove interested me the
most, much more so than Georgia O'Keeffe. Who else
was there? _____.
SL:
Probably Marin.
RD:
Marin, yeah. And he interested me. Kandinsky was a
little, maybe he was. . . . I think he was early on
in that group. He was younger than. . . . Duncan Phillips
was interested in Kandinsky.
SL:
Oh yes. He sure was.
RD:
There was Feininger.
SL:
Were you. . . .
RD:
Yes.
SL:
When you fixed on this painting, apparently from what
we've talked about so far that Matisse had been mentioned
a lot by your teachers but not with any particular
emphasis?
RD:
Uhhh, Loran had. . . . I think I'd started to get
interested there. Loran's book of Matisse. But it
wasn't until, it wasn't until Washington that Matisse
really hit me hard.
SL:
That's okay. I was, as with the Hopper experience,
this became then a central concern. Did you go around
then looking for other works, and reading and studying?
Or was it this particular, something about this particular
painting that. . . .
RD:
This was the thing that I think impressed me the most,
that took my attention primarily, but there was just
a lot that was being presented, and we also went to
Philadelphia a couple of times. And that's where I
saw the [A.E.] Gallatin Collection. Saw that several
times. There's a marvelous small Matisse in that,
although it. . . . I lost the word again. It didn't,
the Matisse didn't really go with the rest of the.
. . .
SL:
No, it didn't, and it's a, I think, a single painting,
that's all he had of Matisse. I don't it measures
up to this painting either for interest.
RD:
I guess it doesn't. It's much smaller. It's a terrific
painting. I saw it recently.
SL:
It has a chair, Louis XV chair, window. . . .
RD:
. . . and window, yeah.
SL:
And it's warm in tone?
RD:
Yeah. Yeah. But wonderfully painted. It's a very good
one, and I guess there are things about it that tie
it to the rest of Gallatin selections. There's a simplicity
that it has and it's terribly rich in the way it's
painted, but [there it sits], and a fairly austere
one in other ways.
SL:
Um hmm. It could go with the general tenor of the
collection. . . .
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
. . . but not the. . . .
RD:
Well, then, so this was a whole different thing, that
the Phillips didn't supply, really, was that aspect
of modernism.
SL:
The Cubist paintings, and the Constructivist things?
RD:
Cubist and Constructivist, yeah. I remember Schwitters
was somebody that struck me, and Arp.
SL:
Yes, he has great, Arp.
RD:
And then, there's Giacometti vertical standing figure,
and I'd never seen anything like that before. And
that struck me. He wasn't a. . . . No, no! Giacometti,
it was not Giacometti. It was Gonzales.
SL:
Yes, that's _____. Yeah, uh huh.
RD:
And it's just about. . . . I've seen, I didn't see
any more Gonzales after that for years and years,
but now I think I saw a little exhibition of his fairly
recently, and so I know what his other work was like,
but this one stood all alone, and I wondered. . .
. There was a little something about him in the catalogue,
I think, but, that he had worked with Picasso, and
helped Picasso with welding and, but then he was a
mystery from then until, oh, until maybe twenty years
ago.
SL:
Um hmm. Only David Smith quite understoods what that
could mean.
RD:
Yes, uh huh. So that when finally I saw David Smith,
well then I moved right to Gonzales.
SL:
So this was like a real feast of the original material?
All the things that. . . .
RD:
Oh yes. Which one didn't. . . . San Francisco had
a few things, so that before I left to go east I did
do a couple of tours of the San Francisco Museum.
It was really quite small. But there was that Pollock
Guardian of the Secret, I think. And. . . .
SL:
Yes. What did you think? Do you remember what you
thought of that when you saw it?
RD:
I was impressed by it. And along with it--I don't
the She Wolf was there; I think it was. . . I know,
it was in the Dyn magazine, it was reproduced in a
Dyn magazine publication that they, that I bought
at the, at their small bookstore, or at the desk.
So, I related the She Wolf to the Guardian of the
Secret. The She Wolf I remembered as something that
was very immediate for me. I, and, but it took me
in to the Guardian of the Secret. They, somehow these
paintings are related in format and time when they
were done.
SL:
Yes, in '43.
RD:
Yeah. And then there were a couple of Gorkys, early,
before the later. . .
.
SL: The Enigmatic Combat, I think was the painting
they had.
RD:
Is that it? They were heavily painted, and. . . .
SL:
Yes.
RD:
. . . one was very much Picasso, but, in its own personal
aspect. The other one was still heavily painted and
had a lot more Miro in it and was kind of on the way
to the later, to his later work.
SL:
That's _____.
RD:
What other pictures did they have?
SL:
Did you understand this, in the sense of a new attitude,
grouping, happening in American painting? Were these
isolated or what, did they _____. . . .
RD:
I hate to keep referring to the book, but I've got
to say somewhere that I, about the Motherwell in the.
. . . There were two Motherwells reproduced in that
book, Dyn. And especially there. There was really
kind of a new flavor that was very attractive to me,
that, it had to do with how I was thinking and yet
to go to a museum, or to look at French modernism
or. . . .
[Tape
2, side B, not recorded]
End
of Tape 2
[Tape 3, side A]
RD:
Okay. Well, I was just starting to say how the Motherwell
and. . . . Oh, yes, and the [William--Ed.] Baziotes.
There was an early Cubist-related Baziotes.
SL:
In San Francisco?
RD:
No, no. In the book.
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
And so, it was these two, the Motherwell and the Baziotes,
that really. . . . I didn't know who these people
were, but they, just in these. . . . I think Baziotes
was in black and white; at least one of the Motherwells
was in color. And they grabbed me. There was a new
flavor, something I hadn't seen in French modernism,
or in the, as I was saying, in the Stieglitz modernist,
American modern. And something very fresh and compelling
and. . . . Well, pretty soon that . . . burgeoned.
From about that point, so within five years that was,
and then it became Abstract Expressionism.
SL:
Right.
RD:
This was my first little sniff of it.
SL:
And that's pretty early, by '43, '44.
RD:
That would have been '43, yeah.
SL:
That's very, very early. The paintings were barely
dry by that time.
RD:
Yeah. (both chuckle)
SL:
Did you feel that was part of your generation, or
that you were slightly younger than that? Did you
have a sense of that? Or any thought about it at all?
RD:
Well, I think it was. Then at that time, practitioners
were really a generation ahead of me.
SL:
Yes they were.
RD:
But certainly there was nothing around that a person
five years younger, as I was--or ten years younger--would
have gravitated to, rather than. . . . That was the
kind of thing that was, that was coming on. And it
was not a style. Baziotes and Motherwell, they were
very different, and it wasn't a stylistic thing. It
was somehow just a bringing together pertinent, relevant.
. . . _____, how do you say these things?
SL:
It's a kind of synthesis, isn't it? Many strong things.
. . .
RD:
Yes!
SL:
. . . that were hard to fit together, that were of
interest and value but how to put them together.
RD:
Exactly. That's very good.
SL:
So the sources are common but the result isn't identical.
RD:
Right. Yeah.
SL:
But that, that's a very. . . . In a way it was a very
important opportunity to see all of this. How, what
a strange set of circumstances, though. (laughs)
RD:
Yeah, um hmm. So where do you want to go now?
SL:
Well, let's see. So just about this time, there you
were participating in the map project, and. . . .
RD:
Oh yes.
SL:
. . . then the war abruptly ended, right about there?
RD:
No, then I was transfered to Camp Pendelton, and the
photograph, the photographic section was really kind
of a boondoggle there. We made, sort of made some
training films, which I don't think ever really materialized.
We went out and drove around the immensity of, on
these little roads, of Camp Pendelton, and it was
mostly pleasure, fun, although we were doing something,
and we were in uniform and we set up camp and cameras,
and then there were, I think there was no, none of
the training film, map, the Disney people were not
doing anything there. And there was another aspect
of the photographic section that was serious. And
these were the photographers, and they were being
used in the field. They were out there, and that was
tough, and they would come in occasionally and get
a glimpse of the soft life that their officers had
and the technicians, the Disney people, artists, had.
And so the next thing was being transferred to the
Hawaiian Islands, and presumably a little more training
there, and then on to Japan.
SL:
Where you would have been in a combat role?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Just _____.
RD:
And the idea of, which kind of terrified me, was that
we were, there were to be teams, three-man teams,
and the team was composed of a photographer, a writer,
and a graphic artist--so I'd be the graphic artist.
The artist. . . . The photographer carried his camera
and a pistol, and the writer I think carried a carbine
and his writing pad, and the artist his art materials
and pistol. (laughs) Three. . . .
SL:
Oooh.
RD:
And these teams were to be sent ahead of an invasion
point. So these. . . .
SL:
An avant garde group!
RD:
Yes, avant garde. (laughter) And these teams would
investigate the situation. (laughs)
SL:
God that's dangerous, that's terrible.
RD:
And send their report. So their job was two-fold really.
One, it was to bring back information, of course,
about the _____. . . .
SL:
I see.
RD:
. . . about the forthcoming landing. And the other
thing was to take this material and take it back and
make training films out of this material.
SL:
So it was reconnaissance as well as documentation.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. So there was that which loomed in my future,
and so I have to admit when the news came--and it
came gradually--of the bomb. . . . The word. . . ?
"We've dropped a huge bomb that's wiped out Japan,"
or something like that. A crazy story. So it took
about three days to really get it straight what happened.
And I have to admit I looked at that whole, the whole
bomb thing as, with immense relief.
SL:
Um hmm, sure.
RD:
The war clearly was going to be over shortly, and.
. . .
SL:
And wouldn't depend on your group going out with a
sketch pad.
RD:
Exactly. So the connotations of the atomic bomb really
didn't sink in for a little while for me.
SL:
Most people didn't understand.
RD:
For most people, yeah.
SL:
So, then, were you just immediately released and that
was that?
RD:
Sent back very soon after that. I went to San Diego
and cooled my heels for a month, and then up to San
Francisco to Treasure Island, and then we were next
door to a. . . . Our barracks was exactly like a barracks
next door of German prisoners of war from Africa.
(laughs)
SL:
Oh my! (laughs)
RD:
What a tough bunch they were. Right next, with just
a fence between us, a wire fence. Then back to San
Diego and then discharged from there.
SL:
So then you and Phyllis made a beeline back to San
Francisco?
RD:
Yeah. . . .
SL:
As fast as you could?
RD:
Well, I guess we went and lived with my parents who
lived in Atherton [California--Ed.]. We lived there
for a bit. And so at that time, I decided that I'd
go to art school. I guess by this time then the idea
of going back to Stanford and doing a lot of pre-law,
all the stuff I'd neglected when I was there, was
out of the question, and so I enrolled at the California
School of Fine Arts, which is now the San Francisco
Art Institute, and painted as a student for a semester.
And then I received a grant, called Bender Grant-in-Aid,
supposedly money for a year. It was $1500, something
like that. And I was informed at the school by Doug
McAgy that, and when I finished up with this grant,
they would like me to come back and teach.
SL:
Oh!
RD:
So Phyllis and I went back, we were going to live
in New York, and New York was absolutely full and
very expensive, and I guess we were at a small artists'
party somewhere and we were saying, well, we just
had to go back home again because we this rather little
money that we had wanted to extend this for a year
and we certainly couldn't make it, and the person
said, "Well, why not go up to Woodstock?"
The artists leave there in the winter, for the winter,
and then you can, there are lots of places to rent
if you don't mind being snowbound. So that's where
we went. So I just, I painted in Woodstock and we
were snowbound, most of the time, and met a couple
of people there, artists.
SL:
How was, did you get in and around New York at that
period, and did you see what was going on there?
RD:
I came down to New York, I think probably all in all
about four times the whole time we were. . . .
SL:
You didn't fall into the crowd at the Cedar Bar or
any of those legendary. . . .
RD:
Not that time. A later visit, did. But I did, I went
to the Sam Kootz Gallery, to look up the paintings
of Matisse [slip of the tongue--meant Robert Motherwell--Ed.]
and Baziotes. Somebody else's work was up on the wall
at the time. Sam Kootz was just so good. You know,
I suspect that I told you a lot of this stuff in our
interview. Am I repeating myself a lot?
SL:
Uh, not too much, no. And again, this is really not
for me; it's for posterity.
RD:
Okay. I told Sam that I'd come to see Motherwells
and Baziotes and I was a little disappointed. This
was a fine painter; I think it was Byron Browne.
SL:
Oh my, yes.
RD:
"But this isn't what I came for," and he
said, "Well, we have some Motherwells and we
have some Baziotes in the, in our storage that I can
show you. Also, Baziotes is in my office right now."
SL:
Oh my! Oh what fun.
RD:
So we went back and we struck it up and we talked
and he invited--Phyllis wasn't with me--but he invited
me and then when he realized that my wife was along,
Phyllis too, to their house for dinner. And I saw
a work. . . . I think he was working in his house,
but then there were a lot of new paintings sitting
around. They were very different from the Cubist-oriented
stuff that. . . .
SL:
He was. . . .
RD:
Then at the time I didn't, wasn't as sympathetic with
the things he was doing then, which is really what
his later style was.
SL:
Yes. So, which. . . .
RD:
I was really most interested by the Cubist orientation.
But nevertheless, I was interested in these too, and
certainly interested in Bill, you know. And so there
was that contact.
SL:
That's very nice.
RD:
And then I guess I went by and saw [Stanley--Ed.]
Hayter. . . .
SL:
Ah hah.
RD:
. . . and Atelier 17, whatever it was. And went out
to lunch with him, and enjoyed that brief visit.
SL:
Were you interested in printmaking early, or did that
come up later in your. . . .
RD:
I really wasn't interested in printmaking at all,
but I forget why. . . . I think they were also in
Dyn magazine. There was a print of Hayter. And something
about his atelier. I guess that's why I went by. So,
I. . . .
SL:
So did you find that New York felt open and welcoming
to you, or was it _____ _____. . . .
RD:
Yes, uh huh. Yeah, except in the nitty gritty aspect
of it: where I could stay. So then Woodstock, and
I really worked hard there. Long, long hours, and.
. . .
SL:
Were you painting from the countryside, from nature?
RD:
Oh, no, no. I was doing abstract paintings.
SL:
Doing abstract?
RD:
Yeah. Really, I had started doing abstract painting
when I was in the service. A little of both, a little
of everything then. I did landscapes, but stuff from
actual observation on the various bases, and then
my indoor painting was abstraction, putting together
all this, all this stuff, that I'd been exposed to.
Trying to put it together. And that's what Woodstock
amounted to, was attempting to assimilate all this
stuff that I had. Because a new influence had come
in, a new, a whole new set of almost concepts. Well,
the class, classes I had with David Park. . . .
SL:
Yes, I wanted to ask you about him.
RD:
He presented a whole new bag to me, not new, but a
different take on. . . .
SL:
I gathered he was a real person you felt deeply attuned
to, someone you liked very much.
RD:
Oh yes, absolutely, yeah.
SL:
Whose work you admired.
RD:
Right. So there was David Park's influence, I suppose
that I was dealing with also in Woodstock.
SL:
Do you feel he emphasized the figure as well as abstraction,
or was it what he did or what he taught, or. . . ?
RD:
At the time, he was doing, he was doing really Picasso-related.
. . . He was doing heads. The paintings were very
flat, very simple. It was, I guess you'd locate the
Picasso period as late thirties. Where the simplest
painting in that period might have been something
like David was doing. But they were just kind, they
were small paintings and divided by perhaps a profile,
very simple profile, and a mouth, an eye and usually
ocher, heavily painted. Not broadly, not, not any
Abstract Expressionist. . . . [But, That] strong set,
surface-oriented--really quite beautiful paintings.
Very strong and simple. And so that's what he was
doing, and so his sympathies went, I guess he was
most interested in me and one other--myself, and another
painter. We were the only ones then doing, in his
class, doing abstract painting. And the rest of the
people were working from still life in the room. And
he had a model occasionally.
SL:
He wasn't too much older than you? Eleven years?
RD:
He was eleven years older, yeah.
SL:
And he, how did you feel about what he was doing in
relation to what you were doing? Was it similar?
RD:
Umm, well, I described to you his. In this book. .
. . I guess this isn't coming off on tape, but. .
. . Now this [Advancer, 1946-47, Fig. 9, page 9.--Ed.]
would be a, really Park influence.
SL:
I see.
RD:
It isn't a profile. It doesn't have the eye and the
nose, but somehow there's. . . . That's kind of the
way the Park pictures were set up. Now in his class
I did this.
SL:
Um hmm, which is really. . . .
RD:
It's really Baziotes-related. And this is the kind
of thing that I was sort of struggling with in the
service. But at this time it has a little. . . .
SL:
That's a more Cubist, purely Cubist look.
RD:
Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I just admired immensely. He
was just so astute and, well, he was just a grand
artist. So. . . .
SL:
So there you were in, snowbound, painting away.
RD:
. . . started struggling away in a real vacuum, quiet,
snowbound in this. . . . (laughs) But everything was
very quiet. And so then our money ran out after nine
months and we, there was just nothing to do but get
in the car and come home. And so shortly after that,
I went back to the school. And this was a little hard
for me, because things had really happened. While
I was gone, things had really happened at the school.
Clyfford Still had come. And I was perhaps one of
the very first G.I. Bill people at the school. There
were, you could count them on one hand when I was
first a student in early '46, I think. But by the
time I got back, after this year of being, year away,
it was predominantly G.I. Bill. And really quite a
marvelous activity. And there's a painter named John
Grillo--he's still on the scene; I see his name occasionally--who,
oh, was one of my friends before I left the school,
and. . . .
SL:
Were you like a group around Park? Were you close
and was there camaraderie and that sort of stuff?
RD:
Uhh, yeah, um hmm. Which I think was sort of broken
up when Still came. And for other reasons, things
just got turned over and the place became much more
active and Abstract Expressionism caught on and Park
was a little bit left out at that point, because these,
the G.I. Bill people were rebellious and set to turn
things over, and didn't paint where they were supposed
to paint in the school, and, you know, they were painting
out in the halls and somebody was making tar effigies
out behind the school, and it was pretty chaotic.
SL:
When Still came, was he kind of a fellow teacher,
or was he a special kind of presence, or did he fit
in, or. . . ?
RD:
Well, Doug McAgy brought him to the school, and he
was the honored top man, the primary teacher.
SL:
Was he much of a teacher?
RD:
Umm, well, in a, not in the way that David was. David
would talk about what you had, what you were doing,
and had marvelous insights as to how to break down
this block and just how to move, and it was a real--a
real born teacher. Still--I was never in one of his
classes, but I got the message from all of my friends
who were--and he never talked specifically about painting,
something that one was working on; he made broad pronouncements,
and it was mostly attitude--and you know the whole
Still.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Yes, so this was essentially what he presented and
he just inspired these guys and steamed them up and.
. . . So, he was responsible for the. . . . There
were other people that McAgy brought in. There was
a photographer named Peterson. And then he had visitors.
He had, Rothko came, and. . .
SL:
Rothko came. Did you have contact with him when he
came?
RD:
Yeah. Well, I hadn't. . . . Oh, I had met Rothko in.
. . . Well, this was a couple years after I had been
teaching there, I think, that Rothko made his. . .
. Or maybe he made his first visit right away. At
any rate, I had met. . . . Oh, how the heck did it
go? No, wait a minute. I'm wondering if I met Rothko
on my second trip back to New York.
SL:
And I should know this.
RD:
No, let's see. I'm sorry; it was the first. But I
guess I must have met him at the school, because I
went to where he was hanging an exhibition, his work.
And he was glad to see me, and so I did know him.
And I helped him hang the show. So then, when he came
back for what was to have been, what was a summer's
tour there. . . . I got the mumps and I never saw
him. (laughs)
SL:
Oh, that's too bad.
RD:
I saw him the first day, and then I came down with
the mumps. I think my children had gotten the mumps
and passed them on to me. And I had a severe dose
of them so I was. . . .
SL:
Was he easier to communicate with than Still?
RD:
Yeah, yeah.
SL:
More sharing of his. . . .
RD:
Yes. [hesitant--Ed.] At first, when I first knew him.
And then I guess the last time I met him, which was
after this period that we're talking about, he had
changed. He seemed, he seemed to have taken on a lot
of the Still attitudes, and there was a paranoia that
he had. And I guess the next time I saw him was in
New York and I met him on the street. Happily talked
and I said, well, "I'd just love to visit your
studio, if you can, if there is a time when I could,
because I'd sort of like to see what you're doing."
And he looked at me and his eyes got bigger and, suddenly
serious, [totally] serious face, and he said, "Well,
we'll see about that." He did ask me to his house.
I never went to his studio. But it was like. . . .
There was the paranoia. There were people that were,
that might, you know, take away some. . . .
SL:
Uh huh, there's something secret to be guarded.
RD:
. . . things of his. Yeah.
SL:
It's intriguing, well, that sounds very paradoxical
to me, because his basic format didn't change a lot,
and the sensibility was really his own, so it wasn't.
. . . I mean, it was so much based on a particular
sensibility that it's not an idea that you can walk
out the door with.
RD:
No, no. But I have heard that he--from other people
who know him--that he was very secretive about the,
his medium of painting, how he would mix his paints.
SL:
Ah, I see.
RD:
Maybe he had a, this trusted guy, Bill Sharp, do it
later on, but for years he mixed his own, and no one
was there that he. . . . That was in a separate room
and there was no indication of what Rothko mixed up
to, in his paint. But he was that way about his ideas
too.
SL:
But there was. . . .
RD:
When I first knew him, of course he wasn't, the Rothko
[slip of the tongue? Probably meant Still--Ed.] format
hadn't arrived yet, although there were. . . .
[Tape
3, side B]
SL:
Slow Swirl, a wonderful painting, was in San Francisco?
RD:
Yeah. And it seems to me it's divided in _____. _____
_____ there.
SL:
Um hmm. _____ _____ _____.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
That was the painting that you found interesting?
RD:
Yes, yes. Very much so. I just was just so disappointed
when the man who was director of the museum briefly,
sold it--or traded it back to Rothko for. . . .
SL:
That was such a deal! (both chuckle) Rothko took him
on that one.
RD:
He certainly did.
SL:
Oh boy.
RD:
And didn't get, got a reasonable one, but. . . .
SL:
He probably got a big later one for the smaller earlier
one, which wasn't very small in the first place.
RD:
It was smaller--much smaller than the, as I recall,
than the Slow Swirl. And then, let's see, Baziotes
visited the school, saw a bit of him, when he did.
I didn't see too much of Still. I just was on speaking.
. . . Never really talked with him.
SL:
But meantime the Bay Area painters were doing something
on their own, forming a so-called figurative, Bay
Area figuration, at this point. Or was that somewhat
later?
RD:
Well, let's see. Let's get the times straight.
SL:
Okay.
RD:
After my Bender, when I was away, that would have
been, I think I started teaching at the school in
'47, in fall of '47.
SL:
Right.
RD:
Park and. . . . And then Elmer Bischoff had joined
the faculty. This was when I came back from Woodstock.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
So it was not only Still on the scene, it was also
Clay Spohn, Ed Corbett. But this activity had, that
I described, had, had it's effect on David too. So
they were all doing. . . . David was no longer doing
the profiles. He was doing a very painty, very heavy
and rather heavy-handed kind of abstraction. And you
know the story of his destroying that work when he
finally had had it with it. And it never seemed a
great tragedy to me that he took those pictures to
the dump because I really didn't think that that was
his forte. He was not an abstract painter. Except
in more of the sense that he was using the heads earlier.
But he wasn't a nonobjective painter.
SL:
Yes. There's a statement in here attributed to Bischoff,
who said that he felt--I guess sort of in the late
forties, early fifties--that there was already a strong
feeling of self-sufficiency among that group of San
Francisco painters.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Some sense of their own identity, even in the midst
of the stimulation and the interest in the famous
visitors from New York.
RD:
Oh yes. Um hmm, yeah. Oh, it had to. . . . It was
not, by any means, an emulation of New York. It was
paralleling, paralleled what was starting up in New
York.
SL:
Right.
RD:
Preceded in some ways a lot of what happened later
in the early fifties in New York.
SL:
Could you expand on that a little bit?
RD:
On. . . .
SL:
On how that may be related to what was going in the
early fifties.
RD:
Well, that. . . . I think it was two very different
locations or environments: physically, culturally
almost (chuckles), who were both responding to this
same thing that I was trying to describe earlier that
was in the air. This new, you said. . . .
SL:
Bay Area School.
RD:
. . . American kind of. . . . Sometimes words just
don't come along. But at any rate. . . .
SL:
The way they synthesize and put things together, the
ingredients form in a different way. I mean, they.
. . .
RD:
Um hmm, so here was this bit going on in, mainly centered
in the art school in San Francisco. I don't think
it was shared really elsewhere in the Bay area, and
certainly not in Los Angeles.
SL:
Well, by this time the term "action painting"
was pretty well established in New York? And did you
feel an affinity with that idea? Or was that. . .
.
RD:
Well, sure. Because although there were strong differences
in character between the work done on the coast and
in New York, it was, the impetus was essentially the
same, this idea, this. . . .
SL:
It seemed that. . . .
RD:
And so, right away, comparisons were being made. And
Germaine McAgy, the wife of Douglas, was a curator
at the Legion of Honor, and she knew, as Doug did,
these New York painters, and she brought their work
to the Legion, and so the Legion briefly became something
that it had never been and hasn't been since--a place
where one saw the most advanced art. When I returned
from Woodstock, this is where I went to see Clyfford
Still; it was a Clyfford Still exhibition there. Large
show that she had, and then she had several annuals
of the advanced, of advanced painting from New York.
So there was, it wasn't as though these two places
simply moved parallel without relation.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
There was lots of cross-fertilization, or--I think--New
York ignored of course what was going on out here,
but we out here were very interested in what was going
on there. A minute ago we were, I was trying to get
the time straight. I forget exactly. . . . I had another
grant, a fellowship. No that was later. Oh, I know.
I taught at the school from '47, and then I resigned
late in '49. Left San Francisco with Phyllis and our
kids and dog, went to Albuquerque. And I want to get
these things straight, because these mark. . . . There
was no figurative work being done by any of these
people up to this time.
SL:
At that point, okay.
RD:
It all happened when I was in Albuquerque.
SL:
Ah hah.
RD:
And that was when Ed Corbett was fired; Hassel Smith
at the same time, was fired.
SL:
Was that why you decided to leave? You felt that.
. . .
RD:
Well, I think that. . . . Complicated why I left.
For one thing, I think I could sort of sense that
it wasn't long for me, or a few of us who weren't
in the top echelon at the school; it wasn't going
to be long for us there. Also with so much that had
gone and was being done, there was a kind of, in a
sense, certain thing were acceptable, certain things
were out, and it was, like there was a way. You in
some sense towed a line, and this bugged me a little
bit. I wanted to get away and look at it by myself
and do my own assimilation, and so, that was another
reason for going to Albuquerque.
SL:
You were going maybe in one direction, and it was
growing in another and the split was. . . .
RD:
Possibly, yeah. I was very taken, at the time, by
Hassel Smith's work in 1949--marvelous work, the best
I think that he. . . . He hardly ever matched that
later on, a couple of places. Did you see that last
show at the San Francisco museum?
SL:
No, I haven't.
RD:
Oh, there's this early sixties painting that matches
the '49 work. At any rate, I was, we became friends,
and in fact we painted a big canvas together in his
studio. He would be there one afternoon, when I was
teaching, and then we had different schedules, and
I'd come into his studio and work on this painting.
[They] were kind of fun to do.
SL:
He seemed to, [the one's I've seen] seem to have this
wonderful lightness of touch that was just exuberant.
RD:
Oh yeah. Well, these were, these had the exuberance,
but they were heavy. They were massive and, but they
were really. . . . They were very powerful pictures,
I thought. And I guess he was eight years or so older
than I was. But at any rate, I was feeling like I
was, that this wasn't good. I wanted to get away from.
. . .
SL:
Did you have. . . .
RD:
I felt really influenced by this, and I wanted to
get away from that.
SL:
You had, I believe, in 1948 a one-man show at the
Palace of the Legion of Honor, right?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
How did that come about, and was it a big show or
a small show?
RD:
Well, that was through Germaine McAgy. And it was,
the museum and the school were all hand in glove,
because Doug. . . .
SL:
Was that your first one-man show?
RD:
And so most of the people on the faculty were given,
David was given a show earlier, the profile pictures.
And then I was given a show. And here I was the lowly
instructor and this was a great surprise to me that
I was offered this exhibition, but I was. So that
was a great stroke of fortune.
SL:
Yes. And how did, how was your work received at that
point? Did you feel a climate of support or. . . .
RD:
I was going to say something earlier about. . . .
When I came back to the school after working snowbound
in Woodstock, I brought work to show. I remember I
spoke of John Grillo, who I had thought was a very
talented guy, and we had sort of worked in the same
room and showed our paintings to one another. And
we had a, we were really quite simpatico. Well, then.
. . . And I felt he thought very highly of my work.
And I came back and I remember, well, I wanted to
show my pictures--they were all small little pictures--and
I wanted to show these things to David and Grillo,
and some of the people. And so I remember walking
into the school, and I had this portfolio with about
twenty of these little panels, and then here I look
at the school and the pictures are massive size, and
the, and so physical and broadly painted, and, well!
And I can remember showing these things to Grillo,
to John, and I could see, you know, he was being very
polite, but he was thinking, "Oh, this is the
guy I thought was so good, and, you know, doing these.
. . ."
SL:
Were they becoming more geometric or more controlled,
or. . . .
RD:
Well, there was. . . . [searching through book--Ed.]
SL:
This type?
RD:
Yeah, I was, I had loosened up a little bit to do
that, but, let's see. . . .
SL:
I think I can. . . .
RD:
I don't. . . . No, maybe this, maybe I had done that.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
But this is a very small picture. This I think is
a little earlier. There really aren't any of those
that I brought back from Woodstock illustrated here.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
This may have been. . . . This is what the work looked
like in '48 in the, or there were works rather like
that in the [one-man show--Ed.].
SL:
Which is in blacks and kind of siennas and yellows,
white.
RD:
Yeah, uh huh.
SL:
And things that were being done, were they much more
field oriented already? Broad and. . . .
RD:
Umm, yeah. But very spontaneous and very loose and
extravagantly painted. House paint, and big brushes,
and no equivocation, no problem-solving, no. . . .
SL:
What did you think about that?
RD:
Oh, I was, my first response was, "Oh my god!
I've been [a] hermit, I've been away from the world
where things are happening," you know. It was
very exciting, but at the same time it was, made me
very uncomfortable because I had this stuff under
my arm that I wasn't going to bring out in the presence
of this really advanced art. (laughs) I mean, this
really vigorous stuff.
SL:
It's very interesting, in that sometimes when you're
all by yourself some of your real essence comes out.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
But the problem-solving, thoughtful considered aspect
of. . . .
RD:
Oh sure, yeah, and you don't have the thing that's
going around, going on around you to sort of spirit
you over any blocks. You've just got to get through
those stone walls by yourself, and. . . . Whereas
at school. . . . Hey, Bruce! [dog--Ed.]
SL:
I don't mind it.
RD:
Is that all right?
SL:
Sure.
RD:
She'll lie down, I think.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
I lost my train of thought there.
SL:
Just the marked contrast between your. . . . So then
where did you go from there, in your work?
RD:
Well, now this, these works, these pictures, this.
. . .
SL:
These are the Albuquerque paintings, hmm?
RD:
This isn't '49?
SL:
That's. . . . I think these are; these start the Albuquerque
paintings. Fourteen, fifteen. Oh, I'm looking at _____
figure. This was a confusing catalogue in some regards.
. . .
RD:
Yes, it's really hard to find things.
SL:
. . . because of the difference between figure numbers
and the paintings. Oh yeah. They're double-entered;
that's why we're having trouble here.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Sixteen, seventeen. This is '49, yeah. [numbers 16
and 17, both untitled, 1949--Ed.]
RD:
Yeah, and so is this. This I did before I went to
Albuquerque. And clearly a lot of Still has come off
into that, and then. . . .
SL:
For this _____.
RD:
. . . and then a bit more on my own in this. [number
19, untitled, 1950--Ed.]
SL:
Yes, this is very, this is much more open than kind
of closed aspect here.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
This is more calligraphic too.
RD:
Ah hah!
SL:
As though you're getting ready for a, this next area
where you start working on. . . .
RD:
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter. I was just wondering
if that's '49, or whether that's Albuquerque, but
I don't see, I think it must be '49, before I went.
SL:
It is '49. So these. . . . And yet these two have
a built sense about them. . . .
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
I see that they're constructed. They're not tachism
or just a brushstroke moving across the surface.
RD:
Yes. Yeah. But there's a lot of that influence there,
nevertheless. So then, I hadn't finished up at Stanford,
but I, it was simply a matter of writing to them and
I had credits accumulated for being in the service,
for having taught at the art school and all that,
so I came out with more than enough to graduate, and
so they mailed me a degree. And so then I could go
to the University of New Mexico as [a] graduate student,
so that's what I did.
SL:
Back to being a student again?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
That's interesting how that happened.
RD:
Yeah, after being a teacher for three years.
SL:
Why there? What was there?
RD:
Well, I think I just loved that country. I'd been
through it twice--once on the train, once driving--and
it was just an area that was just very compelling
to me. And so, I applied there. And was, as I told
you, dog, children, loaded car. . . .
SL:
By this time you had two children?
RD:
Yeah. And, oh gosh. . . .
SL:
My goodness, what an adventure! (laughter)
RD:
We got to Albuquerque, and it was not the place it
was not the place it is now; it was really a cow town.
Real raw. . . .
SL:
Did you go for the landscape?
RD:
Huh?
SL:
You went, did you go there to study with someone specifically,
or because of the landscape?
RD:
No. I didn't know who was there. I had no idea. I
just, University of New Mexico was the school, and
I debated briefly. I knew I wanted New Mexico. There
was also a school in, not Santa Fe; it's. . . .
SL:
Taos?
RD:
Southwest. It's in New Mexico. Beautiful country,
but a school with a smaller town, a little bit more
isolated. Sorry, but I can't think of the name of
the town.
SL:
That's all right.
RD:
It's still small. Well, that was the only debate I
had in my mind. It was going to be New Mexico, and,
but clearly it was going to be the University of New
Mexico. So Phyllis and I arrived at the Hand Motel
on the outskirts of town, and oh boy! was it a hairy
place. (laughs)
SL:
Oh my, after San Francisco. Did you wonder about the
wisdom of that?
RD:
So we. . . . We lived in Sausalito, so from Sausalito
to the Hand Motel with broken-down rusting cars outside
our door and. . . .
SL:
Oh my.
RD:
And so, well, we were there for a couple of weeks.
SL:
Goodness. But you did beautiful paintings there. You
did absolutely beautiful pivotal paintings there.
RD:
Yeah, things really started to come together for me
there. It was a very good situation for me, because
there was none of this fear of painting, I mean, that
I was involved with, there at all. It was a pretty
cut and dried art school. People did proper still
lifes, and so I arrived.
SL:
What did they think?
RD:
Well, I was somebody who, I was a little difficult
to handle. The teachers didn't know quite what to
do with me. I had been a teacher; they knew this.
And here I was in. . . . [temporary dog ruckus--Ed.]
SL:
Oooh.
RD:
And then, so, to make a long story short, they gave
me a studio, in a Quonset hut. And so I had, was almost
never at the art department. The instructors would
come to the Quonset hut, maybe once or twice in three
months.
SL:
My.
RD:
Really, really left me alone.
SL:
Did you, was there anyone who you felt close to or
got to know?
RD:
Well, I had a good relationship with Raymond Jonson.
SL:
Oh, you did! That's fascinating.
RD:
Yeah, yeah.
SL:
_____ _____.
RD:
And I visited his place fairly often and we would
talk, and he was the only one who was really, had
any kind of understanding of what I was doing.
SL:
Um hmm. He was, his work is very different, but he
was a very interesting person.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
He was kind of, he was very mystical and involved
with the landscape of the area.
RD:
Exactly.
SL:
Abstract painter, in a way.
RD:
Uh huh. There was some relation to Kandinsky.
SL:
He was somewhat theosophical I think.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And there was. . . . Wasn't there a group surrounding
him as well?
RD:
Earlier. Earlier there was.
SL:
In the thirties, right, yeah.
RD:
By this time he was alone. And, but the university
kind of set him up there, and then he had retired
from teaching classes--although he would visit me
in my Quonset hut occasionally. But mostly I visited
him, and he had a really fine big house on the campus,
modern house, fairly modern, and his studio and all
his immaculate studio situation--I think it was in
his basement, in an ample basement in this place,
but all beautiful, which didn't really impress me.
I was used to a much different studio situation, kind
of rough and tumble and dirty and _____ _____. Still
am.
SL:
Well, his painting was very impeccable.
RD:
Oh yes, oh yes.
SL:
Sometimes it's very, it's just so.
RD:
Yes, his studio was like an operating room.
SL:
And those tiny little brush strokes.
RD:
Everything, the colors in jars were all on the walls,
a whole wall of colors in jars, and each one had its
little carefully labeled and I'm sure filed and cross-filed.
. . . (chuckles)
SL:
He had ideas about color and music and things like
that as well.
RD:
Oh yes, oh yes.
SL:
So you and Raymond Jonson talked. That is really quite
remarkable.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
He was probably the only person within a thousand
miles. (chuckles)
RD:
Yeah. There was another sympathetic man named Les
Hawes; he was the head of the art department at the
time. I liked him. And there was another rather impressive
Austrian, a man named [Catchel, Katchel], who was
a sculptor, who tried to be the force, and he would
give lectures at night, and rather inspiring to, but
not related to contemporary art, really. And really
quite disdainful of what I represented and the new
art that was, one was beginning to see in the magazines.
This was, and what occasionally some student would
bring into class.
SL:
Oh.
RD:
This was appalling, and he would talk about Michelangelo
and the art spirit, and he. . . . But, he was an intelligent
man. He knew what he was talking about, and had considerable
force in the, in the lectures at any rate. He was
the only one on the small faculty who really had very
little to do with me. I don't think he ever visited
my studio. I was something else. So then, I guess
that sort of gets us up to a point and we can carry
on from there.
SL:
Okay, sure. Maybe we could talk a little bit about
those paintings next time too.
RD:
Okay.
SL:
About the Albuquerque paintings.
RD:
All right.
SL:
They're really special, they're wonderful things.
RD:
Okay. Do you want to finish out the tape?
SL:
No, it's okay.
End
Session 1
Session 2
Interview with Richard Diebenkorn
Conducted by Susan Larsen
1985 May 2
Interview
[Tape 4, side A]
[Note:
Side B not recorded]
SL: We are now in Santa Monica. And last time we had
left off with your move to Albuquerque, I guess, as
you recall, in 1950?
RD:
Yeah. We, I was thinking about to move away from there.
SL:
Yes, okay. I wanted to ask you if we could talk a
little bit about the paintings that you made there
and how you felt about them.
RD:
Oh yes.
SL:
They seemed to be a real breakthrough.
RD:
I think that there was a breakthrough there. Possibly
some six months after I arrived. It was a little slow
at first as being in a new environment is for me.
Not exactly slow, but things just didn't come together.
And then suddenly they started to. And so I did quite
a few pictures there. They're, primarily, they're
kind of rather austere color: blacks, whites, ochres.
There was something else I was going to say.
SL:
Who, what. . . . Did you go out exploring when you
were there? Did you go out looking at the Indian things
or the landscape?
RD:
Oh, a little bit, a little bit, and then later on
when Ed Corbett moved there we went fishing and, you
know, went up, that took us into the famous mountains
and the Taos area and what not. So, I don't think
I did much much before then, but we did little bits
of. . . .
SL:
Was there any interest in the pottery and the rugs
and blankets and all of that?
RD:
Well, I had been right along interested in the rugs.
But the folklore thing is something that's easy for
me to procrastinate. I tell myself I'm very interested
and, but it doesn't prove out that way, really. So
we never, the whole time we were there, the two-and-a-half
years Phyllis and I were in Albuquerque, we never
went to an Indian dance. We were always about to.
I was going to say something further about the paintings.
Oh, I know. About half of what I did there is lost,
because Phyllis's stepfather had a ranch in Pomona,
where, when we left Albuquerque just before going
to Urbana, we stayed there for almost a month, or
over a month. We took all our belongings with us from
Albuquerque, and I had several rolls of canvases.
And canvas, everything I did I rolled up, tubes. And
two of those tubes just disappeared. I think I had
stored them in a barn on the ranch, and when we left
I just forgot to take them. And then Phyllis's stepfather
died and the ranch was sold and so . . . whatever
happened to the pictures.
SL:
And they just disappeared.
RD:
Some of them are illustrated in that. . . . I had
photographs, so some of them are in that catalogue
that we looked at yesterday.
SL:
My goodness. Any, it would be interesting to. . .
.
RD:
There's one in particular I really wish I had packed.
SL:
It's not this one. . . . [looking through catalogue--Ed.]
RD:
No, no.
SL:
. . . because this was one in the show.
RD:
Yeah. [pause] Some of the ones I liked less survived.
This is gone.
SL:
Oh my, what a shame. That one seems to have a, almost.
. . .
RD:
This is lost. This is lost. [chuckles]
SL:
Oh no! [pause]
RD:
I think that one the University of New Mexico took
as a thesis.
SL:
Is this the image of a cow? Or something like that?
RD:
Yeah, it has, had a. . . . Some of that animal imagery
came about because we. . . . For the first year in
Albuquerque we lived in caretaker's small cottage
on a kind of estate ranch on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
It was right on the Rio Grande, on the west side of
town. And surrounding us were. . . . Our cottage had
a little picket fence around it, had a big ditch behind.
And then there was pasture. We were surrounded on
three sides by horse pasture and sometimes cattle.
So we might. . . .
SL:
Not yours, though. Someone else's?
RD:
Well, it belonged to the ranch. They raised both cattle
and horses, so we might get up in the morning and
go outside and find our house surrounded by animals.
This was fun for the kids. Oh, and then another event
there that related to some of the imagery: we went
to a state fair in Albuquerque. And this was a total
animal thing, and I just never, never [had] seen prize
pigs and their humanoid aspects. They looked like
big, hairy, fat men (laughter) sitting around with
the, their. . . .
SL:
They say they're very smart too.
RD:
Oh, they're smart; pigs are smart, yeah. Yeah, and.
. . .
SL:
Did you like the country? Did you ever want to really
live in the country always, for ever and ever?
RD:
Oh, I don't think so, no. And Albuquerque was, I guess,
my period of reclusiveness--although we had good friends
there and it wasn't as though were were, I was a recluse.
But we were estranged from the kind of thing we had
been used to in San Francisco. In Albuquerque movies,
good movies, just cowboy pictures then, in Albuquerque.
And there was a little music on campus; there were
concerts. But by and large we felt kind of isolated,
and . . . .
SL:
Many of the. . . . The writing and articles on your
work at that time talks about how it gained in scale,
in the sense, not this overall size of painting, but
the space inside the paintings.
RD:
Sense of scale.
SL:
Yeah.
RD:
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 immediately apparent [when]
one is there, I think. Do you agree?
SL:
Yes and, though, it seems that from that point forward--and
maybe even before that--your painting has a type of
perceived scale, a perceived sense of much space and
much air and that is truly maybe the central mystery
of what you--at least for some of us--of what you've
accomplished.
RD:
Oh.
SL:
Is that kind of thrilling sense of ample space and
something very large and something quite well put
together.
RD:
Uh huh. Well, I think that is primarily from the physicality
of New Mexico.
SL:
The way that something of a modest size could seem
so very large, and. . . .
RD:
Um hmm. Actually the sky is no larger in Albuquerque
than here.
SL:
That's true.
RD:
And yet it seems immense there. And Phyllis and I
both had thought, well, we couldn't really live away
from the water, the sea, too long, very long, so that
was the apprehension when we moved back there, that
there'd be no ocean. And well, the sky took the place
of the ocean.
SL:
Interesting.
RD:
But then Urbana was truly a place without (laughter),
without ocean.
SL:
Okay. Move on to that. You went in the fall of 1952?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
To teach?
RD:
Yeah, uh huh.
SL:
And this was the University of Illinois. I've been
there; I kind of know what it looks like.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
I gather that it was not an immediate thrill when
you first saw it?
RD:
Well, I had positive responses to real mid-America
college town, with elms and kind of gemutlich social
thing. We were, we lived in Urbana, not in Champaign.
We lived in a house like anybody else on the faculty,
in one of those houses on those Midwest streets, and
we had a professor of, in the music department living
next door--and there's a strong music program--so
we were, twice a week go to concerts. Something neither
my wife nor me had had in our lives was the kind of
Christmas that they have there. And it's, and there
is snow and people go around caroling and that was.
. . .
SL:
Oh yes, very nice.
RD:
You know, that's nice. And we would go around with
Professor Fletcher and his kids. We saw quite a bit
of them. And we met, through them, we met a man who
was attached to the physics department and his wife
who was a painter. And they became our really--I was
going to say life-long friends--but things didn't
quite happen that way. She was, the name was Klostler.
She was an extraordinarily elegant woman. She was
German, moved to Austria, and I guess it was in Vienna
that she met Henry Klostler. He was initially a radiologist
and then moved into physics, and was a Jew, and she
was not, and she went with him, left in the really
terrible times, and they lived in Albania for a year,
and then finally were able to get to Portugal and
they came to this country. Here I'm rambling again.
SL:
Oh, that's okay.
RD:
This, but this is a significant person in our lives.
Gertrude--the woman--was. . . . I think if I didn't
know her so well and loved her so, I might have dismissed
the work as being a little craftsy, a little bit decorative.
It was a little bit. But it was also very knowing
and elegant and. . . . Well, we left then. We saw
them almost weekly. He was, he was one of these people
who is very important in his profession and his discipline,
his calling, and yet extremely quiet, shy retiring--absolutely
low profile. So he actually was a famous physicist,
and he wrote a book called Information Theory. Presented
it to me, with a little inscription. I couldn't read
the first paragraph. (laughter)
SL:
Aah.
RD:
And it was mostly numbers and symbols and a whole
300-page book of absolute undecipherable. . . .
SL:
Yeah. But they were lovely to be in your life, to
have around?
RD:
Oh, absolutely. They were just terrific people. So
we kept up with them through the years. They visited
us in Berkeley later on. And then Gertrude--I forget
just what it was; it was a kind of cancer-related
thing--and we knew that she didn't have too long.
And one evening we got a call from Henry. Oh, he left
Urbana and went to Brookhaven, on Long Island. He
headed some program there, and we visited them on
Long Island. But then this is later: we received a
telephone call from Henry, who said, "Gertrude
has just died, and I'm going to follow her. So, that
was the end of the Klostlers for us.
SL:
Oh my. Oh no.
RD:
So. . . . Well, I tell about them and then I can't
go on to really describe what they meant to my thinking,
to my work. I can only say that a relationship like
that is very, very important to one.
SL:
Um hmm. So the people in, so the people then were
very. . . .
RD:
What?
SL:
Certain people were very interesting and it brought
them into your life?
RD:
Oh yes. And then there were others there, there were
others in the music department and. . . .
SL:
Who was in the art department? (laughter) Or was that
not important?
RD:
There was a man named Bailey who was emeritus. He
was, except for a couple of instructors that I saw,
he was the only one who I really had much to do with.
He had been a rebel in the department all through
the years, and was a good paintner, and there were
some of the others who were simply career-oriented
and did the ladder in that terrible backbiting way.
It was really, a lot of it was pretty ugly, what.
. . . And here I was this lowly instructor watching
this. . . .
SL:
What was going on.
RD:
. . . combat, which was deadly and ferocious, and
so that was how it was in the art department.
SL:
When. . . . Maybe we could talk a little bit about
when you were teaching, how you felt about, what you
hoped and wanted to do in your classroom with your
students? What your goals or, were as a teacher. Did
you have any?
RD:
My, the classes that no one wanted were the ones that
the lowliest of the instructors got, and so I found
myself teaching drawing and painting to architects.
The school of architecture at Ubrana had a requirement
that their freshmen--and sophomore, I think--take
one art course. So there was, there were two--one
professor, one assistant professor--who ran this program
for the architects. And they prescribed absolutely
what was presented, week by week, what one covered.
And what it was, was totally a discipline, that really
can't hurt anyone, but the discipline of drawing and
painting from looking with absolute precision, and.
. . .
SL:
So it didn't leave you much room then for your own
initiative?
RD:
Well, I made it. That was. . . . (laughter)
SL:
That's great.
RD:
So that it was. . . . It was a kind of rendering in
charcoal or conte crayon and that. . . . We would
then judge the students periodically, the three instructors
and the two professors who ran the program. I think
three times during the semester, on an evening we
would get together and go through each person's, each
of the three instructor's work, and grade it.
SL:
Oh.
RD:
So we'd look at piece after. . . . Here would be so
and so's work, week after week.
SL:
Would you be grading the students or grading each
other? Or was that. . . .
RD:
Grading the students.
SL:
Students. Good.
RD:
So we would average the grade. There were five voices,
five grades given, and then an average taken.
SL:
Goodness.
RD:
Well, in my teaching, what I right away found, was
that--which one would expect really--among these budding
architects in each class there was, there were usually
three to four people who really were putting something
into these drawings. You could just, they were doing
the discipline just like the other guys. Other guys
were cold and good A's. Maybe some of the D's and
C's were somehow getting something else, and then
maybe even some of the ones that they would say in
the judgings, D, F, maybe, I would feel about those
people that would kind of panic because they couldn't
do this kind of thing that the A. . . . So they would
summon up something else (laughter), and this would
be so much more, so much stronger than the guys that
were doing what they were supposed to do.
SL:
Maybe then they went off in another direction. They
weren't meant to be architects.
RD:
Maybe so. It's hard to tell what happened to any of
them. Maybe they were some pretty strong architects.
SL:
Maybe those are. . . . Yeah. Maybe those were the
ones who. . . .
RD:
But at any rate, it was a really losing game because
I began finding, you know, if I would encourage this
other thing in the drawing--which I found myself doing
with some of them, because they were kind of up against
it. The architecture course was a really difficult
one, and so this, they had to get good grades here
and they were in. . . . But then some of these people
I would encourage and I kind of let them know how
I felt about what they were doing here, and how to
enhance this and. . . . But then, it was losing game,
because then we'd sit in these. . . . I forget what
these grading sessions were called; it was some funny
euphemism for. . . .
SL:
Critique, or something like that?
RD:
. . . chopping these people. Yeah, it was that French
word, critique, critique, that was. . . . It's a word
that they use in French schools for exactly that,
a critique. But at any rate, the losing thing was
that I'd find these epople that I had pushed in a
certain way, I was pushing them from a C to a D and,
well, that was very bad of me. So I was uncomfortable
about. . . .
SL:
Yes.
RD:
. . . about how things were going there, and there
was absolutely no moving either of these professors,
and rightfully so. The architecture department said
we want these people to learn to render and do so
accurately and elegantly and so the two professors
were following the prescription.
SL:
So in your own work you were able to, though, to work
quite profitably there, it seems.
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
And those were, that was a lovely period, and. . .
.
RD:
Um hmm, I had a studio and bedrooms and. . . .
SL:
Did you have any upper story rooms that you could
convert to a studio?
RD:
In both, we lived in two houses while we were there,
same neighborhood, and both studios were just fine:
large, ample, _____.
SL: In some of the paintings you made then, people
have remarked about semi-figurative developments and
sort of marvelously meandering lines in the Urbana
paintings.
[Interruption
in taping? Sound quality deteriorates some for at
least a while.]
SL:
Do you feel the painting Archer was this, in this
period?
RD:
Well, that is, yeah, that was the only one that was
intentionally representational. It does. . . . I have
it here in the next room, actually. It does represent
the archer. The rest, nothing else does.
SL:
Not specifically?
RD:
Hmm? No. They're forms that I brought from, with me
from Albuquerque, mainly. But in Urbana the color
things kind of came forth. In Albuquerque it was,
as I said before, subdued, austere, black, gray, white.
SL:
Now the greens and yellows and oranges.
RD:
Um hmm. And I don't really, I don't know quite how
to explain that. It's just something that a very different
kind of environment produced. It's, actually, it's
the same way with Ocean Park paintings. I never tried
to work in terms of this coastal light, ambiance,
and yet people assume I do. There have been reviews
that refer to rather specific things on the beach--hotdog
stand or something like that--and I'm just making
paintings, and this environment has produced such
and such a look and feel. The paintings in Berkeley
were much stronger in color, as maybe you have realized.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
The color down here is a little bit drained, a little
bit grays often.
SL:
Well, the light coming in this room, studio, too has
a very special quality.
RD:
Um hmm, um hmm.
SL:
It's hard to put into words, but it's. . . .
RD:
It certainly is. I really don't know about the light
of the place until I've worked in that place for some
time. And then I can tell you about the light looking
at the paintings. But I guess I don't understand people
when they will come to a place and they'll say, "Oh,
this is a real painter's light here. This is marvelous."
Well, it seems like a grand light to me, but I don't
see how it's that different from 50 miles away, or.
. . . Except then I, but the way I can tell is in
terms of work.
SL:
What shows up in your own work?
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Do you look for a place to work, then, a space to
work in that. . . . Are you very, very concerned about
the gradient and quality of the light or a certain
feeling?
RD:
The only think I require in a studio is daylight,
and coming from a direction where I don't get direct
light, which really destroys things with the strong
light that comes in. And also a light situation where
I can somehow work without reflection on the surface
of the canvas, and beyond that, I just accept the
light of the. . . . If it's a good painting space,
well, the light that goes along with it.
SL:
That's interesting. Because. . . . Of course, even
in this neighborhood, there have been people who've
made the whole light and space phenomenon of California
artists. . . .
RD:
Oh yeah, there's Jim Turrell and the. . . .
SL:
[Robert] Irwin and [Maria] Nordman.
RD:
. . . who lives two blocks down.
SL:
It's just a different awareness, do you think?
RD:
Different awareness?
SL:
Or not?
RD:
[pauses] Well, sure. Very different. But exactly how
and. . . . I beg that question.
SL:
Yeah. Somehow interesting that those, that would come
up strong. . . .
[Tape
4, side B, not recorded]
End
Tape 4
[Tape
5, side A]
[Note:
Side B not recorded]
RD: . . . and made arrangements for the show and,
which I guess was early in 1956. It was my first show
with Ellie [Poindexter--Ed.], but it was showing of
the abstract painting. Something else, I. . . . The
Guggenheim had a show. . . .
SL:
Yes, I have a note on it. James Johnson Sweeney organized
Younger American Painters.
RD:
Younger American. . . . Yeah.
SL:
At the [Guggenheim].
RD:
And that was another thing that Ellie Poindexter drew
on, from having seen my piece in that show.
SL:
Um hmm. And did Sweeney come out to see your work,
or did he pick it from things he knew in New York?
RD:
I think he just asked me to send a piece.
SL:
That's nice.
RD:
I didn't meet him until later, Sweeney until later.
Where was I in the. . . . Oh, in, well, at this time
I learned a kind of lesson about, for me, about my
relationship to agent, dealer. I found myself with
three dealers. And [Paul] was very miffed that I should
go with Ellie. And did a lot of reasoning with him,
and of course the, it's the marketplace, and that's
where your work is really seen, and so there was a
kind of strain in our relationship there. And I didn't
do anything further with Frumkin because, well, I
realized that I, my, I'm not that prolific a painter
and I just can't divide up a year's work; it just
doesn't work. How do you do that? You just, if you
have a show out here and one out there in New York,
well. . . .
SL:
More than enough, huh?
RD:
. . . both shows, both exhibitions are weak for, weaker
for what's taken to the other one. So since then I've
been very careful to just have one dealer.
SL:
What is--just my opinion, which probably doesn't belong
on tape--but it seems that there have been quite a
number of very talented people here on the west coast
who have west coast dealers and never have an east
coast dealer. And that it doesn't help the growth
of their own career.
RD:
It doesn't. . . .
SL:
It doesn't. . . . The dealers, if the dealer here
does not promote his best people back east, that they
never go beyond a regional thing. . . .
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
. . . and that some of them aren't willing to do that.
RD:
Some of the dealers?
SL:
Yeah. That they're too afraid of. . . .
RD:
Maybe that's. . . . That's possible.
SL:
Not maybe realizing that the only way that person
really can have a national career is to show nationally.
RD:
Um hmm. I haven't thought that it might actually be
a conspiracy on the part of the local dealer.
SL:
I always felt that maybe what you're saying makes
a lot of sense, because I always thought that everyone
would be better off, if this person got the full chance
that they deserve. That the person who represents
them here would have a more major artist to represent,
if they took care that the most was done with that
person.
RD:
Um hmm, sure. But of course the dealer here then has
to face splitting commissions and. . . .
SL:
I guess so, but it's a much. . . . Well, anyway, it's
a shame, in a way.
RD:
It is, sure.
SL:
Because it's something that a New York-based artist
might not have to even think about or worry about.
RD:
Um hmm, right.
SL:
But it's just, one can go so far and no further without
that. It's a shame if that's cut off artificially.
RD:
Yes. It most certainly is.
SL:
Anyway, so you were in Berkeley and your painting
started up again and they seemed to have once again
some kind of coloristic and compositional thing that
evolved into another place.
RD:
Um hmm. I feel that I'm really, where it comes to
describing the changes that take place in work, I'm
really not doing that very well, and I'm sorry.
SL:
Maybe I should be more helpful or something like that.
You mentioned that they, you felt that they had become,
the color had become more intense.
RD:
Well, let's see. Now this work immediately followed
Urbana. I think maybe the Urbana painting was the
most saturated in color.
SL:
Here's one. Here's one in '55. This would have been
very early then, right?
RD:
Well, at this time in Berkeley. . . . Actually, in
'54 things really started to come together for me.
It was really a pretty exciting time. In the evenings
I listened to lots and lots of music, mostly Mozart.
And I really felt that that music was feeding right
into the work. It was nothing I tried to push or.
. . .
SL:
You were doing a concentrated listening to a lot of
Mozart?
RD:
Um hmm, yeah.
SL:
Were you. . . .
RD:
The literature, the recording thing. . . . Curiously,
there wasn't that much recorded. There were a few
of the big symphonies and maybe three of the late
concertos, and there were, one could hear sonatas,
but we were starting to get recordings from Europe
and so there was just so much more to hear all of
a sudden, [where] Mozart was concerned. And, well,
so this was my excitement, away, outside of painting
at that time.
SL:
And you had a grant so that you didn't have to teach,
at that point?
RD:
Yeah, that was, that was, really saved my life, and
that. . . .
SL:
This was the Rosenberg fellowship?
RD:
Yeah. That helped me a lot, and when I was on the
arts council, national, NEA [National Endowment for
the Arts--Ed.], later, and, I really knew what I wanted
to push there in terms of grants because of my experience.
SL:
What was that?
RD:
Well, we were really broke, and I actually had arranged,
I had made--I put in this application, but wasn't
counting on anything coming through--and I had actually
been to the taxicab company and was, in two weeks
I was going to start (chuckles). And then the grant
came through and so that was really a lifesaver. So
my feeling about grants when I was on the council
was that you don't try and put somebody, a few artists,
make them instantly wealthy; that many, many grants
and enough to tide somebody over in. . . . Because
that's how it was with me. I just needed that tiding
over at that time. But curiously enough, the grant
idea hadn't, I mean, it wasn't anything new, but people
thought that, a surprising number of people thought
that the really strong, the few strong artists in
the country should be rewarded by large grants, you
know, like $50,000 or something like that.
SL:
Yes, I know. And often those are the people who are
doing all right.
RD:
Um hmm, sure, yeah. So that grant showed me a lot
and I was eternally grateful for having gotten it.
. . .
SL:
You must have had a very hard time.
RD:
. . . at that really crisis, crucial, time for me.
SL:
You must have had a very supportive spouse, too.
RD:
I'm sorry?
SL:
You had a very supportive spouse.
RD:
Oh yes, I do.
SL:
And all these things you described were not easy on
the family.
RD:
No. But Berkeley was--is--a fine place to live, neighborhood--as
opposed to New York City.
SL:
Did you make use of the university community, the
library and the music thing?
RD:
I did, yeah, yeah. I did. I guess David [Parks--Ed.]
joined the faculty in Berkeley in '57. Elmer [Bischoff--Ed.]
joined it something like '59. And then I went back,
I went back to teaching at the, first at California
College of Arts and Crafts, taught there a year, and
then when I went over to. . . . Well, I took a year
off, after the Ellie [Poindexter--Ed.] show, I guess
it was in 1958, that I, because I had done very well
and I thought maybe I just didn't have to teach at
all then--and I didn't, at that point. But I had at
this time a studio at home in my backyard. And there
was never any reason to leave the premises, you know,
and this became suddenly lonely not teaching--or not
doing something, not having some reason to go to San
Francisco, or go anywhere. And I could just remember
one morning looking out the window and watching these
men on their way to the bus with their newspapers
under their arms and envying them. (laughs)
SL:
Oh! (laughs)
RD:
They were going out into the world and I'm going to
go shut myself up in the backyard. So, I went back
to teaching right after; '58 was the only the year
that I hadn't taught until I quit UCLA in '73, and
so it was just a. . . .
SL:
So you had a better experience, though, I would assume,
with teaching, after the U of I?
RD:
After. . . ?
SL:
After the University of Illinois, you had more liberal
teaching situations.
RD:
Yeah, well, but they weren't university. . . .
SL:
They were [more] art school?
RD:
Art school, yeah.
SL:
Did that fit better?
RD:
Oh yes, much. Much more relaxed situation. And not
enough in it for anybody, so that there wasn't the,
all the competition and animosity--that, actually,
is the teaching situation that I always preferred.
And I had said to myself I'll never, never go. . .
. I guess that was the reason I didn't go to, didn't
accept UC Berkeley. And then it wasn't till in the
mid-sixties that Fred Wight came up and persuaded
me to come down to UCLA. And I guess I did that because
I wanted to move to L.A. and I wanted a reason to
come down here.
SL:
Um hmm, gee.
RD:
And my friend Bill Brice lived down here and I just
thought it was time for a change.
SL:
Well, could we go back a little bit to the fifties
and then. . . .
RD:
Sure! Yeah.
SL:
Okay. I'll go make a little loop back to it.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
In the early fifties, David Park had moved from being
an abstract, basically an abstract painter, to doing
figural work with abstract elements in it.
RD:
He made his change in, I guess, it was 1951.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Because I'm not a good correspondent; I didn't write
to any of my friends, and I was in Albuquerque, and
I told you I, it was isolated, and then Ed Corbett
appeared. There'd been a big blowup at the school,
and he'd been, he and Hassel [Smith--Ed.] and David,
Elmer had been fired--or one of them. I guess Ed and
Hassel were fired and then the others. . . .
SL:
Said, "We don't want to be here if they're not
here?"
RD:
Yeah, yeah. It was a new director that nobody could
get along with, and in this turmoil is when David
abandoned nonobjective painting and he began painting
direct, directly painting the figure, not just figurative
elements.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
And so this was what, this was the news that Ed had
from the home front, that. . . .
SL:
What did you think of that?
RD:
. . . David, "David Parks (sic), you know what
he's doing?" And, "He's doing these kids
on bikes," and. . . . (laughter)
SL:
What did. . . .
RD:
Well, he was very disdainful of this. So. . . .
SL:
But soon there were others doing. . . .
RD:
Well, not for a while, really. Of course there were.
. . . I guess when I say "others weren't,"
I'm talking about painters.
SL:
Yes, uh huh.
RD:
Sure a little bit of representational. I guess that
sounds a little snobbish to me, when I say nobody
was doing figurative painting, whereas most of the
artists in San Francisco were. (chuckles)
SL:
Were doing just that, huh.
RD:
But I think David was really all alone. Well, there
was Jim Weeks who never became an abstract painter.
But his work was strongly influenced by. . . . He
was a good friend of. . . . We saw a lot of Jim and
so did Elmer and David. So that would be the exception,
would be Jim. But David did something really quite
radical at that time!
SL:
Do you know what the, was there something that prompted
it particularly, or. . . .
RD:
I think. . . . He's made a very good, rather brief
paragraph, a long paragraph of what prompted him to
do this, and it would be something to read. For one
thing--I told you earlier--I didn't think he was really
a nonobjective painter. He required a specific human
subject. This is what turned him on in painting, and
I think he wasn't doing too well. It doesn't say that
in his paragraph. I think that things really kind
of stopped. . . .
SL:
Yes.
RD:
. . . and he felt that he was just going through the
motions and it was the kind of--the word--the thing
he involved with was this kind of, this very kind
of style-oriented. . . .
SL:
Sometimes in a period of crisis, too, people return
to the tangible. I wondered if, it sounded like he
was in a period of turmoil.
RD:
Well, that's. . . . Uh huh.
SL:
I don't know.
RD:
That's very good, a contribution.
SL:
Yeah, even someone like, following the two world wars,
there was a return to figural, to the human figure
on the part of very avant garde artists, many of [them].
RD:
And then too, he had, and I'm sure, antipathy right
along to what happened at the art school, the kind
of explosion that took place. And here were suddenly
these kids who were--even though rough and vigorous
and--but were suave and. . . .
SL:
Or facile, maybe?
RD:
Yes! And it makes sense to me that David would just
want to. . . . This wasn't really art to him, this
wasn't really painting to him. He would be disdainful
of improvisational painting, and. . . .
SL:
Truly stylistic. . . .
RD:
. . . he wasn't going to be on the stage in his studio
and improvise.
SL:
So when you came back to Berkeley, you renewed your
contacts with Park and Bischoff and. . . .
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And did you, you met. . . .
RD:
And by that time, Elmer had followed suit.
SL:
Yes. You met to draw the figure, is that right?
RD:
Excuse me?
SL:
You met frequently and drew together?
RD:
Yeah, uh huh. And the seeds of the (chuckles) of what
was to happen to me were in that, in those figure-drawing
sessions--and also in our. . . . They were the people
I saw--all the time. And so it was kind of two against
one. (laughter) These people were talking about their
painting problems and. . . .
SL:
Had you always been. . . .
RD:
. . . _____ representation and the. . . . Hmm?
SL:
No.
RD:
. . . well, and figure and. . . . And then, I had
never given representational painting a mature chance,
I think, at the beginning, being unaware, as a student
is. Of course I, as I have told you, it was representational.
But I had never, as a painter, which I felt myself
to be now, with certain awareness of what it was all
about (chuckles) I felt that I wanted to take a shot
at it, at representation.
SL:
Had you continued to draw things in your sketchbook
along with the abstract work?
RD:
Not really.
SL:
Because some people have done that.
RD:
Oh maybe occasionally, yeah. But it was pretty strictly.
. . . The drawing was in terms of concepts and . .
. abstract painting. And I felt--I've said in someplace
there that I felt that it was really square (chuckles)
to work from subject matter, and that. . . . Of course,
figure developments immediately destroys the abstract
spatiality, and there's no "a little bit of this
and a little bit of that." So, it was something
I had stayed strictly away from, except in these drawing
sessions at night. So I did that for years, drew at
night with these people, and, which I enjoyed that
actively. I would say it's kind mindless.
SL:
And you had something of a community feeling at that
point?
RD:
Um hmm, yes. So then, I remember the day that I decided
to change over to small canvas, pile of stuff on the
table that looked sort of right to me, and I worked
from that. I still have those pictures.
SL:
Were they things, just like gathering the things around
here, or was it something special?
RD:
Like--and I, with the still life that I did after
that, I always kind of liked the things fall, and
never try and arrange anything.
SL:
Um hmm. A statement that's in that book, you mentioned
the difference between getting the object right and
getting the object sitting right. I wonder if that
rings a bell? The rendering of, I guess does it mean
something, the rendering of the object correctly,
or the placing of that object in the painting, and
that that might be. . . .
RD:
Well, I forget exactly what it stated there, what
the statement was really about. It's, I guess, sitting
right," I would be referring to the kind of balance,
the relationship of forms, weights, spatially, surface-wise,
and that kind of fitness that the picture wants to
have, and in the case of still life, things then sit
right. I think that's what I meant by that phrase.
I don't know where the rendering of, what that has.
. . .
SL:
Well, I, that was my own [interpretation], maybe that's
why.
RD:
Oh.
SL:
And this is something else attributed to you. "Meaningful
symbols aren't invented as such; they are made or
discovered later." There was much discussion
about the scissors paintings. . . .
RD:
Uh huh.
SL:
. . . and the fruit and the various things that you
began to paint at. . . .
RD:
Well, I would certainly affirm what you. . . . I think
I said that. (laughter)
SL:
Maybe someone said that you said that.
RD:
I know.
SL:
Some of those paintings seem to involve objects that
were in the painting almost the same size they were
in actuality, some of those early small ones.
RD:
Uh huh.
SL:
Which seemed interesting, --maybe not--but that seemed
interesting to me.
RD:
I never really considered that.
SL:
Maybe it's not true, but it seemed that in some of
them. . . . I remember your retrospective, '77, this
whole wall of modestly sized paintings, and they were
often. . . .
RD:
Scissors.
SL:
And food. And they seemed to be close to what their
tangible real-life scale was.
RD:
Ah hah!
SL:
And they seemed to be, not, there wasn't the kind
17th-century arrangement of things, where you had.
. . .
RD:
And no. . . .
SL:
Or even the Cezannian clustering of this and that,
but. . . .
RD:
Um hmm, um hmm.
SL:
. . . they seemed often to be not exactly adrift but
somehow in an open space or in counterpoint to something
else.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And it gave them a curious intensity. . . .
RD:
Ah hah.
SL:
. . . by the fact that they were just. . . . Like
here, here's this. . . . Like that.
RD:
Uh huh.
SL:
I'd have to look through it to find some more, but.
. . .
RD:
In this regard, not to try and answer your question,
but with still life--and I was criticized by a couple
of people in the first show of representational painting
that I had in New York, the criticism being that I
was an abstract painter and I was simply using these
forms to hang my painting abstract ideas on, and essentially
the forms that I used, even the figures, were pawns.
And this, it really made me quite angry, because--and
now I want to go back to the still life--almost always,
except of course obviously the Scissors here and this
didn't happen--but with a group of forms, they would
be familiar things. There'd be an ink bottle or, and
glasses and a pipe ashtray, cigarette butts, or, and
some other thing, a jar of brushes or something like
that. I'm describing this to kind of deny that criticism.
I worked with this group of objects and I got to realize
that in the process of painting I could find out which
objects were real to me, were viable by whether or
not they stayed in the picture. So that I worked with
a lot of the same objects that consistently stayed.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
There were other objects that, as I worked with painting
and it wouldn't work and I'd make alterations and
adjustments, and finally I'd realize, "That bloody
thing has to just leave!" (both chuckle) And
so out it would go.
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
But this tells me that these objects were terribly
important. . . .
[Tape
5, side B, not recorded]
End
Tape 5
[Tape
6, side A]
[Note:
Side B not recorded]
RD: . . . and right along, that I'm not exactly resisting,
but I, but some of your questions want to bring out
something a little more theoretical, and I find that
I . . . beg those questions a little bit, and I'm
finding that I. . . . Maybe it's just I'm lazy, or
it's easier just to go in a, to deal with the facts
and what happened and. . . .
SL:
Well, sure. I'm trying to, as much as possible. .
. . These are the kind of more abstract questions
that I think that the people who look at your work
and people who write about it or think about it ask
themselves.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And that's, and if. . . . I thought it would be wonderful
if, to have your thought about it because it, there'll
be other people who will invent things to explain
that.
RD:
Sure, yeah.
SL:
So whatever. . . .
RD:
This is taped, isn't it?
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Okay.
SL:
So whatever one has of your own thoughts on the subject
is quite precious and important.
RD:
Well, I'll try. I'll try and come up to some of those
questions.
SL:
But it's. . . . Sometimes it's. . . . Maybe the questions
aren't well put and I should make them more specific
or something. In any event, this cast of objects and
landscapes and figures began to be in your work, and.
. . . Were you working with it at home? Looking through
the window?
RD:
By this time I, let's see, I was, I had left my studio
in the backyard that I'd built myself. I was in that
studio about a year, and the isolation--I needed to,
I think I wanted a bigger place--and so I found a
good space in Berkeley, downtown Berkeley. And it
was there that I painted in 1955, did all the work
that I showed with Ellie in 1956. And it was the end
of 1955, I guess, that I did the abstract--the picture
of the landscape over there; it actually is the first
one that I did. I said that the first one was a still
life, but it wasn't. I went outside, and what I was,
what I decided to do, or I know the impetus for the
first one being a landscape. Essentially what I did
was what I had done at Stanford, is get in the car
and go out and look for something that looked like
it might make a good painting. So. . . .
SL:
Just as you had done in the. . . .
RD:
So I got in the car and did that and I know right
where I did it, and. . . .
SL:
Did you make a sketch and then paint it in the studio,
or. . . .
RD:
No, I worked right from the canvas.
SL:
Right on the canvas.
RD:
Yeah, and I did it entirely on the spot.
SL:
It doesn't line up with axis of the canvas, too, the
horizontal one.
RD:
Hmmm.
SL:
You have a very stable vertical and horizontal and
diagonal?
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
It's quite reminiscent of the early work.
RD:
Well, it does. It's not intentional, but it certainly
does relate to the '55 paintings that I was, that
I was doing.
SL:
These are, this was a portable size, too, this one
particularly.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
With the little, small size so you could take it out,
and do it.
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
And as they grew in scale and. . . .
RD:
Well, the larger things were done in the studio. So
I guess after doing the, this landscape--and this
probably all happened in a week--the landscape and
several still lives--then I approached a big canvas
with a figure.
SL:
Uh huh. And now many of these do seem to have--at
least it would seem--a certain gestural aspect of
the way they're standing, and they don't look like
made-up figures to me.
RD:
Oh, lots of the figures, often the figures started
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 got painted out completely once the painting was
going, and I might just improvise the figure, invent
it.
SL:
Um hmm. Did it, did they begin with the figure? Or
the context? Or did both grow simultaneously?
RD:
I think they would grow simultaneously, yeah. And,
but I never really, in terms of the outcome, I certainly,
I don't think I ever started with what finally. .
. . Or I would, often I'd start with the, it would
happen this way: Where the figure would start as a
figure and an interior, and then possibly there would
be a window, and then pretty soon I'd take the wall
away and reveal the rest of the landscape--or it might
work in the reverse. The figure in the landscape would
sort of bring about something like this.
SL:
Oh.
RD:
. . . which would become a figure [in the, and an]
interior.
SL:
And that. . . . It's often been said that the indoor-outdoor,
the sense of someone being in a constructed space,
sharing a landscape space, is not--not all of them
are like that, but many of them are that way--there's
something about the way we live or the way things
are in that.
RD:
[Or] possibly for me. I'm sure that that idea--it's
certainly not my idea--but a figure in an interior.
. . . Well, I'm repeating what you just said: this
does symbolize a certain take on an individual in
terms of his interior/exterior.
SL:
It's also a marvelous pictorial device--Matisse, of
course, used this.
RD:
Um hmm!
SL:
But it's also a marvelous pictorial device to gain
one kind of light inside. . . .
RD:
Oh yes, yes!
SL:
. . . and another kind of light outside.
RD:
Uh huh!
SL:
And the contrast.
RD:
Although I think Matisse for me is maybe--not always--but
in a lot of his paintings, he is the exception to
that rule. . . .
SL:
Yes, he is.
RD:
. . . where somehow he can make a consistent kind
of indoor/ outdoor. . . . And there isn't the break
between outdoor/indoor. . . .
SL:
No.
RD:
. . . except in the drawing and the idea.
SL:
In that regard, it seems your paintings are much more
linked to that light of the natural world.
RD:
Yes, yes.
SL:
In a very painterly way.
RD:
Inside a room--for me, I can't think of the interior
of a room sharing the kind of light that's outside
that, that room. It would to falsify everything for
me.
SL:
Um hmm. That's interesting. Where the Matisse often
we. . . . He plays with the mystery of that, like
he'll make the outside look more artificial than the
inside, or. . . .
RD:
Yes, and I guess it's. . . . Yeah. And it's the earlier
painting which is really the traditional way of thinking
about it, the way I think about it, which is the indoor
light and the outdoor light. I guess it's in his later
work that he starts to break down that, or he does
break down that difference.
SL:
Um hmm, the earlier work is in some way more austere
than the later. It appeals so much to mind as well
as the eye, it's such wonderful stuff. I wanted to
ask too about--at least the ones I'm looking at here,
tend to have a single figure, or maybe two, rather
than groups of people.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Is there any particular interest in that consistency?
RD:
Well, I think. . . . I think that's personal symbolism,
again. I often began with two, rarely three, figures.
And I think I could count on my hand, one hand probably,
the paintings where both figures survived. But somewhere
in the process--for one reason or another, for painting
reasons, or for psychological reasons or whatever--the
process of losing. . . . I was going to say the process
of losing the figure was gradual. Losing one of the
figures--or maybe both of them. . . . But I remember
the first time it happened that I was working with
a figure in an interior and the figure just was not
compatible. I just couldn't see these two elements
together, and so to, x, just wipe out, paint over
that figure, and suddenly find that the still life,
I mean, that the interior was on its own with somehow
the presence of the figure still there being sort
of alive and human with the traces of it, the, of
that figure and what that figure had done to the interior
in the process of trying to get it in a sympathetic
relationship or in a relationship. That was very exciting
to me, the first. . . .
SL:
Well, here, this interior is so bright, and the figure
seems so lost in her own space and thought.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
. . . that a person and the emotional thing that they
throw off, and the, and space and color related but
so different, it seems.
RD:
Um hmm. That's from a picture. I know that the Tennis
Sweater I felt that that was a kind of outrageous
(chuckles) thing for the attitude of the figure. I.
. . .
SL:
I guess.
RD:
There were several things I was trying to combine
there, psychologically, the sort of funny outrageousness
of the tennis sweater and. . . .
SL:
How much did the psychology of these figures involve
you?
RD:
Well, really a lot. And ultimately a figure survived
in terms of that, of the successful dealing with that
psychology. So again, I think of that criticism which
irritated me so about my figures being pawns. And
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. They're really, there are very
few. . . . Well, there are things that 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.
So there isn't. . . . 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, in, or in extreme conflict.
SL:
There's a whole dimension there of feeling that. .
. .
RD:
Yeah. So that's the thing that, that's the thing that
I, the major sacrifice, for me, in doing abstract
painting. Obviously there are other things that are,
that weigh in. . . . So that I opt for abstract painting.
But I sorely miss that one source of opposition, conflict.
SL:
Yeah. That's. . . . There's a kind of large of embrace
of land, space, ideas in abstract painting that's
thrilling and satisfying, but in some ways a lack
of specificity.
RD:
Um hmm, and it runs with the whole theory of abstract
painting.
SL:
Um hmm, yes, it does.
RD:
Abstract painting breaks down with, I think, with,
well, an overdose of specificity. But. . . .
SL:
You don't hear the dialogue.
RD:
Well, I think of the Mondrian pictures of around 1914,
with the gatherings of forms and the opening up and
the sort if breathing. . . .
SL:
Pier and ocean drawings. . . .
RD:
But he can, this is about as far as he can go in achieving
the kind of opposition of, between a contraction and
an expansion, which is, well, a little bit like, relates
to what we were just talking about, I think.
SL:
Um hmm, you could see him start to create something
large and in the Pier and ocean drawings how that
forays out there. . . .
RD:
Yes.
SL:
. . . then it starts to broaden out into this cosmic
thing, and then the parts become parts in the systemic
whole, and the whole is quite wonderful.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
But those little movings and gatherings are very important
to the space.
RD:
And I think that in my abstract painting--I don't
like to think that I have any formulas; I think some
people think I do--but I gravitate to a--usually it's
high in the space--concentration of forms that. .
. . And it's, I guess it's, my explanation, although
I haven't done that for these reasons, but my explanation
of how this, what my [idea of this is, why I do this],
is that this is the closest I can get, this concentration
of forms, of small-scale elements, is as close I can
get to something like a figure or something like an
object that has its concentration as opposed to the
larger, less-charged space on the other end.
SL:
Um hmm, the field.
RD:
The field, which would be comparable in figure-painting
to the objects around the figure which have a much
less, are much less concentrated in their psychology.
And then one of the limits in figure-painting to me,
I, there would have to be a limit to how closely I
could deal with--with a head, say--which is such a
concentration of nonpainting stuff, you know. (both
chuckle)
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
The clothes, or the hands a little less, and then
of course the. . . .
SL:
The faces will [vary accordingly]. . . .
RD:
. . . chair and the rug less, and the wall none, or
almost none. So a kind of hierarchy of importance
as to the various elements of a picture, that's something
that I've struggled to somehow bring into abstract
painting. And. . . .
SL:
They are very much interrelated. Things you learn
in one way you apply in another way, or things you
find satisfying in certain measure, hang on to. .
. . Interesting. Very relevant to today's painting,
too, and all the things going on.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
The why to, you know, why be a figurative painter,
why be an abstract painter, _____ just that, you know,
that's in vogue or out of vogue or whatever.
RD:
Right.
SL:
And they're always changing.
RD:
And then I could never understand the people who would
I'm sure honestly say--painters--would say that abstract
and figure painting, or abstract and representational
painting, it's all the same. And it is such a dichotomy
for me.
SL:
How about those who say only this or only that.
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
How about those who say only this or only that: only
this kind of painting is serious, or only this kind
of painting is relevant.
RD:
Well, I guess I was guilty of that at one point, when
I told you that I felt it was square to do--that representational
painting was just out! (laughs) Abstract painting
was the only, had the only relevance. Of course I
don't feel that now at all. That it's really, it's
a day-by-day decision, really, to remain in abstract
painting or attempt representational painting again.
SL:
But each time that change has occurred for you, that's
been a big switch, big change, with accompanying.
. . .
RD:
Oh! I should say! The largest switch that can possibly
in my work.
SL:
It's a, everything [move] in a. . . .
RD:
Because it's from end of the stick, way over here,
to way over there, as far as I can go. And I'm aware
also that this extreme dichotomy is, one invents at
some time or other, or that. . . . So, I can conceive
of somebody honestly believing that there isn't a
difference. I don't think, in my generation, I don't
think I've ever heard any painter in my generation
say that there was no difference; it was younger painters.
SL:
Or even the idea of doing both simultaneously. That
seems like the whole accompanying mental and physical
set of everything, of your whole support structure,
has to take a big turn, to move in one direction.
RD:
Oh, I would think so, yes. Do you know of any painters
who do--I mean good painters--who do abstract painting
one week and figure-painting the next?
SL:
No, I think that a lot of people are trying to combine
things simultaneously, like say a Susan Rothenberg
kind of painter, or Jennifer Bartlett kind of painter,
or, you know, they. . . .
RD:
Well, they're fusing. It isn't as though--and I, maybe
I misunderstood you--I thought you were considering
actually doing. . . .
SL:
No, I was thinking of that as an impossible situation.
But I would think that. . . . But people seem to be
trying to combine the elements. . . .
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
. . . in a way that. . . . In my mind, that's still
abstract painting; it's not really about. . . . It's
emblematic rather than truly figurative.
RD:
Yes, um hmm.
SL:
It's using the figural element as a sign or. . . .
RD:
Yes, and I've tried that a bit. I mean, I try it all
the time, usually gets painted out.
SL:
That's different than really tackling the world, concrete
world.
RD:
Um hmm, right. Yeah, that's something I--probably--I
won't do again.
SL:
Okay, shall we begin with that?
RD:
Okay. So, am I going to see you tomorrow, or is it
the Friday?
[Tape
6, side B, not recorded]
End
Tape 6
End
Session 2
Session
3
Interview with Richard Diebenkorn
Conducted by Susan Larsen
1985 May 7
Interview
[Tape 7, side A]
SL:
. . . you were talking about Susie Gablik's book and
your reaction to that?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Why Has Modern Art Failed?, it was called, I guess.
RD:
Yeah. But why on earth would an artist change or allow
his message, so to speak, to be distorted by such
situations as people want, own your work and take
it off and thereby it becomes an elite. . . .
SL:
Is it that, was it a reaction to the conceptual artists'
desire to not have work be a commodity, that kind
of thing.
RD:
Well. . . . Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
And is it, you were saying that these extrinsic things
are changing the course of how people are making art?
RD:
Well, apparently. And certainly I know that was a
large factor in the art of sixties, especially, early
seventies. Possibly if I had been starting in at that
time, well, I would have felt these pressures and
my strategies, so to speak, would have been, would
have conformed, or would have been affected by those
pressures. And I suppose because I really started
in the forties, with a very different kind of environment,
without any possibility of dealer, or anyone handling
my work, or any money to be made or anything like
that, I have a different, totally different stance--and,
one which. . . . You would say to a student at that
time, "Oh, what do you really, what are you really
up to?" And "Are you going to chop this
up in some way because of these pressures?"
SL:
As the various, as different waves of style or of
movements after--even after hard-edge painting, even
after the conceptual art movement--as those things
came along, did you think about those, or. . . . There
have been artists who have started out in your generation
who have really shifted their focus according to subsequent
artistic phases that have come along, and attached
themselves to those things.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Were there times when you thought about that, or.
. . .
RD:
Of course I thought about it. And I'm sure right along
I've been affected, and I think I've been affected
by what's being done now right along, but I haven't
done what these artists you've just referred to, actually
shifted stylistically or. . . . Clearly. (chuckles)
SL:
Uh huh, yes.
RD:
I'm going to close that window because of all the
traffic.
[Interruption
in taping]
RD:
. . . to say was that. . . . I almost suggested this,
but then I thought, "Well, no, you should do
it your way, and I should be surprised." But
I almost did suggest that you bring in kind of inflammatory.
. . .
SL:
Oh, I see!
RD:
. . . statements, things to react to, because we were
talking about the reasons, or the causes, for going
off on a tangent. That's all.
SL:
Oh, okay. Well, as, at a certain point in the sixties,
it seemed that the activity in painting as a, as the
primary vehicle of progressive art, people tended
to lose faith in painting as a carrier of those ideas,
and there was so much more activity in sculpture and
then eventually conceptual art and various things.
And do you remember, did you have any feelings about
painting at that point, and sorting through your own
commitment to painting and drawing?
RD:
Sure. I never for a moment shared any of the mistrust
in painting as a--how one phrases this--a viable vehicle?
(laughter)
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
However, I was very much involved with teaching, as
one has to be as a full-time teacher. And I found
this disturbing, the effect of these pressures that
you've referred to on the students, and. . . . Because
I continually found that my, the best undergraduates
that I dealt with, the sharpest ones, when they became
graduate students, then something happened between
undergraduate status and graduate. Suddenly they were
in quotes,"artists," but with this totally
different stance, this kind of sixties nonpainting,
whatever they'd be, would be doing. And that disturbed
me a lot. And the, it was only the docile ones that
sort of kept to it. There] are exceptions, too]. .
. .
SL:
Yes, I would think there would be.
RD:
But usually it was the plodders and the docile ones,
perhaps pretty good ones, who stayed with painting.
And then shortly before I stopped teaching in '73,
I started to feel the swing back to the core of things
(chuckles) in visual art, I think, I believe there's
something in the painting, more than in sculpture.
SL:
Well, certainly that was a time too when the, I'd
say in the political climate internationally and in
this country, made people think about the role of
art in a, in not even a subject-matter way, but the
position of art in the economic strata and the role
of the artist and. . . .
RD:
Yes, um hmm.
SL:
. . . a lot of ways of, a lot of parts of inquiry
seemed to come into art that were not there in the
same form before.
RD:
Uh huh. In this, this was disturbing to me too. It
was, I'm not saying that, by any means, that an artist
should put his head in the sand or just mind the paint
going onto the canvas; of course he should be aware
of, of what, those subjects you mentioned. And I just
felt that they had gotten ahold of artists in a way
that seemed very wrong to me.
SL:
Is there a. . . . I don't want to suggest a way of.
. . .
RD:
Distorting them. . . . Hmm?
SL:
It seemed to me that in, that it was a very superficial
thing to try to invalidate a medium that had been
with us since the cave painters. . . .
RD:
Sure, oh yes.
SL:
. . . on the basis of something quite immediate.
RD:
Exactly. I feel that states it very concisely. And
where I was concerned, the only reason I was involved
with art was that I had a passion for the painting
and drawing, which began some fifteen or more years
before I even knew about art. We've been on this topic
earlier. And so not only the tradition as you say
since prehistoric painting, but also my own history
with, it just meant this unfeasible, that I might
have dropped this. (chuckles) I mean, my reason for
being and doing, and well. . . .
SL:
There's, well, it's just my opinion, but it seemed
too that some of the people who were making art at
that time weren't, didn't come to art that way. .
.
.
RD: They certainly didn't.
SL:
. . . didn't have it in their bones, so to speak.
RD:
Um hmm. And, well, there's just a way of speaking
of it that describes something of what I mean. When
I was a student in art school, I, my friends, referred
to ourselves as painters. That was going to be our
calling. And that changed around totally in the sixties.
Students came, they were going to be artists! They
didn't know anything about painting; they'd maybe
never. . . . They weren't painters, they weren't drawers,
and they weren't sculptors; they were artists. And
they were fishing around, or sort of waiting for,
to be chosen by one of the, those talents in one of
those potential shoveling of earth, or. . . .
SL:
Oh, you mean to work as an apprentice or something?
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
To work as an apprentice?
RD:
Oh, I think they were in search of media.
SL:
I see, uh huh. That brings up an interesting sort
of topic. In the, all along in your career, you've
had quite--at least this is how I see it from my distant
perspective--but it seems that your work has been
well received from almost the beginning. And yet you,
it doesn't seem you've sought out a lot of media attention.
. . .
RD:
No.
SL:
. . . or tried to capitalize or manufacture it. I
wonder. . . .
RD:
Well, I thought that, I felt right along that that's
very much secondary, or even irrelevant to what an
artist is up to.
SL:
How so? Could. . . .
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
How so? Could you explain?
RD:
How so?
SL:
It does play a large part in our, the art world out
there.
RD:
Well, is it fair to answer, in answering that to just
shift time a little bit, and. . . .
SL:
Sure, yeah.
RD:
. . . think about Cezanne?
SL:
Please.
RD:
Not that Cezanne didn't have considerable passion
at one stage of, several moments in his life, to be
recognized by his peers, possibly to show his work
in Paris, or, and be one of the artists, those things
beyond his painting. And then it's true in later life
when people started to visit him in Aix, his painting
picked up a lot: he became much more prolific and
clearly he was delighted. So I'm just sort of pointing
out that of course there are these requirements, or
rather needs, for an artist to have a little feedback
from the outside world. But it seems that today it
becomes kind of all-consuming.
SL:
You sense a, do you sense a sense of competition for
attention, or a feeling of this one gets more attention
or that one gets more attention, or are you pretty
much not thinking about that?
RD:
Oh, I just, I can observe that kind of. . . . That's
what makes for a rat race or however you refer to
it. I have certainly observed that, but I don't share
any of this personally. And I'm not intending to be
holier than thou or. . . .
SL:
Oh yes, it's. . . .
RD:
Also it disturbs me a little bit to be in this older
generation of artists and being appalled by the orientation,
the overt kind of ambition and P.R. and etcetera,
because I can, as soon as I start talking like that,
I think of myself as a young painter and thinking
of some of the old guard and the disgusting way they
used to talk about how art used be: [not] a high degree
of craft and artists could really draw and. . . .
SL:
Uh huh, it becomes a "it was better before."
Yeah.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
But isn't, but at this stage in your career, with
the enormous regard in which you're held and the position
you have, do you find that there's a different, that
there's a pressure involved with that, or can you,
have you sort of grown into it and it's not so much
something you feel?
RD:
It doesn't bother me. I guess I've, well, I suppose
there are occasionally instances when I can be mightily
bothered, but for the most part I'm not. I've, to
use your phrase, I guess I have grown into it. You
say I've been well received, but. . . .
SL:
How do you feel about that? Is that wrong?
RD:
I suppose finally I guess I have to admit to that.
I've been lucky in certain ways. From that first exhibition
that I, we talked about, where you might say it was
simply because I was on the faculty that I had one-man
show, at that time an early, an early age--not today.
SL:
But you attracted the attention of people who not
only made a real commitment of their interest and
attention, but have stuck through all this time--I
mean, collectors, of people who were interested in
your work. It seems that there's been a steadiness
about it.
RD:
Hmm, well, I guess there was.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
Oh, I guess there's a little discomfort involved with
talking about these things--which relates to what
we're talking about, of course. I can say I, as I
just did, and you did, "I've sort of grown into
this; it doesn't bother me," but I betray a little
bit of nervousness in the discussion of it. I don't
really, I'm not comfortable being, altogether comfortable,
being accepted. (chuckles)
SL:
Uh huh. Which you incredibly are: coast to coast,
international.
RD:
Well, and that's ironic, because when I started out,
there was, well, I wasn't accepted, except in a very
limited sense: and Germaine McAgy and Douglas and
the people around the art school. Outside of that,
there was no acceptance at all, and there was sort
of an assumption that embarking on this career of
being an artist meant being poor. And so I was resigned
to that. . . . And being unrecognized, hopefully recognized
within a small circle. And that's certainly the way
it started out. There's a painting over there on,
that. . . .
SL:
This one here?
RD:
Yeah, that. . . .
SL:
That's an earlier. . . .
RD:
. . . I'm going to be lending to Paul Schimmel for
a show, and I was looking at it yesterday, and, well,
that's the one I want to give him, but he responded
to several works in '49, in 1949, or '48 I think it
is, that he--well, come to the point Dick. What I'm
wanting to say is that I expect that painting on paper
to be accepted. I expect it to be liked.
SL:
Yes. Yes.
RD:
Now when I did the painting, it would have been absurd
to put it up anywhere, in San Francisco--or anyplace.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
Put it up in, at the Cedars [sic] Bar in New York,
and maybe a couple of people would like, or hang it
up at the art school. . . . But it's curious for me,
having started where I am, to look around at all the
people who just assume that they know all about this--and
do know quite a bit about it--and yet their counterparts
then didn't know anything. (chuckles)
SL:
Um hmm, and there are, it's probably the same situation.
. . . Well, maybe it's not, but one would think that.
. . .
RD:
Well, that's an interesting thing to get on, right
there, I think.
SL:
Yes, it's, how the audience has changed and. . . .
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
That's the, that, though, was the avant garde and
artist recipe for that struggle with the, with ideas
and the public and your position in the society, and
that was the recipe of that time.
RD:
Now which. . . . The recipe?
SL:
That the artists vision would be ahead of the general
viewer, even the general educator.
RD:
Is that a recipe?
SL:
Well, I think came. . . .
RD:
It seems to me it's just sort of built in and, as
a set of facts, and I find "recipe" a curious.
. . . "Recipe" implies. . .
SL:
Something set, you mean?
RD:
. . . an construction or concoction of. . . .
SL:
I guess, I don't mean it in a negative term. But I
was thinking that that was something that was there.
. . .
RD:
No, I didn't think you meant negative.
SL:
. . . that was there in the 19th century and that
was expected. . . . I think a lot of young artists
coming out of school today are truly hopeful of acceptance
and, if not instant, but soon some kind of sense that
they're doing something that someone is appreciative
of, and if there's a, if there is a long period of
really bitter struggle or rejection, that's not expected
necessarily. It's not automatically assumed that it's
going to take a very long time, if ever.
RD:
Um hmm. Yes. And yet these same people want to be
with. . . . A lot of them cherish the idea of avant
garde, of. . . .
SL:
Um hmm, yes, and are they compatible?
RD:
I'm thinking of Bill Wilson's commentary Sunday, on
David Hockney.
SL:
Oh.
RD:
You read that I'm sure.
SL:
No, I didn't. I missed it.
RD:
Oh. Well, David didn't come out too well in Bill's
eyes. But Wilson compares the--it's a review of the
show in San Francisco of his, of Hockney's stage.
SL:
[Bitter]? Uh huh.
RD:
And Wilson just observes the character of the comparable
work that was done, say in the first decade of the
century. . . .
SL:
In Picasso's Parade, and things like that?
RD:
Yeah. And what David work amounts to, which was totally
charming and from my point of view--and I think Wilson
says so too--but he also has great reservations. I
didn't mean to get into Hockney but the. . . .
SL:
Well, the, perhaps the reason I used that word is
that I've just been reading a whole stack of graduate
papers on, from a seminar I did. . . .
RD:
Are you back to the "recipe"?
SL:
Yeah. . . . on modernism and supposedly postmodernism,
and the distance on the notion of an avant garde that
is abroad in the critical community--and in many circles:
in literature, music, art. . . .
RD:
Today?
SL:
Yeah. . . . that the separation of the artists' mission
from the perception of the audience, the assumption
that that's going to always be the case. Many have
written about it as a historical set of concepts that
were generated out of the late 18th, early 19th century.
We are wondering if modernism and the avant garde
are linked to one another, if modernism has taken
a turn or is no longer, if we're no longer modern,
perhaps we're no longer living in that set of circumstances.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
That's at least some of the ideas that are around
at the moment, and I think graduate students and I
are trying to grapple with. . . . Therefore, if there
is more of a rapprochement between the artist and
the audience, say as perhaps there might have been
in previous times, that perhaps the, a long period
of a lag time or a catch-up or a feeling of being
alone and apart is not necessarily true always. Does
that make sense?
RD:
Sure it does, um hmm.
SL:
If the artist is pressing forward almost skittering
and straining to get back _____ along this direction,
maybe the audience has changed, but maybe our way
of perceiving things has changed somewhat too. If
his work is charming, perhaps there were things, say
in the 18th century, that were immediately charming
too.
RD:
Yes.
SL:
And maybe those were not less for being so.
RD:
Agreed, sure.
SL:
I mean, I don't know, but this is. . . . Whereas in
the modernist point of view something that is seductive
to a receptive audience, there was something maybe
not quite strong enough or lean enough for it to be
important.
RD:
Well, that wasn't faint praise that I, when I said
charming.
SL:
Yes. No, no, I didn't mean, I knew that you meant
that as a positive thing.
RD:
I see it. . . . Well, I'm sure not differently from
you, but I, what I want to say now is a somewhat different
approach to this same. . . .
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
I think if, in a time of change, of, where there are
big changes, which of course there were at the beginning
of the, of this century--certainly not my idea; I
mean, this is the traditional one I would think--that
the artist is out there sniffing out the change that's
coming in and making his expressions in terms of that,
about that, feeding the change. . . .
SL:
Yes.
RD:
. . . and so of course in a situation like that there's
going to be a lot of catch-up that the audience will
have to be doing, assuming that the audience is not
in touch as the artist is with what's coming in. And
isn't that how it was?
SL:
Um hmm, yes.
[Tape
7, side B]
RD:
. . . lagged. Either the changes aren't, the broad
changes are not occurring, or the artist isn't sniffing
them out.
SL:
Ah hah, yes.
RD:
And. . . . Because I think the lag is built into that
situation.
SL:
Well, what. . . .
RD:
And I think it would be, one immediately thinks charm
and immediate exception, acceptance, [correcting from
exception to acceptance--Ed.], [well, but] when things
have. . . . Rococco, and. . . .
SL:
Yes, Fragonard.
RD:
Fragonard, and. . . .
SL:
And yet how wonderful certain Watteaus are. . . .
RD:
Yes.
SL:
. . . which are charming on the surface and deep on
the inside.
RD:
Yes, yes! But I just wanted to go on with that, and
think about that moment what seems to me that things
were turning over, were changing, which belies what
I said. Here was a situation where there's this immediate
exception, acceptance, [that's in here]. Or maybe,
maybe there was, maybe at that time, there, things
did momentarily kind of settle out an things were
in place for a while for everyone and in order that
they could immediately respond to and love a piece
of music that's, that is, has real integrity and,
or a piece of architecture or a painting.
SL:
I wonder if there's an analogy. When an artist establishes
a group of things to work on and a way of working
and an identity, and then as your life and career
go on, could it be that the audience after a long
period of time either senses or is, learns about what
you've been about?
RD:
Oh, I'm certain of that! Yes, yes.
SL:
And then as your later work comes along that's built
on that and moving forward from it, that later work,
there's already a backlog of some kind of feeling
for that work that's in the mind of the audience.
RD:
Yes, um hmm.
SL:
So that then the new work doesn't look, I mean, there's,
there are components of something familiar and then
something new to offer that. . . .
RD:
One hopes, "something new to offer." Because
in lots of cases it just, the work simply looks dated
or old hat. An artist who is continuing attempting
to develop, what his, in terms of his roots or in
terms of his. . . .
SL:
There's a difference too I think--and here I'm sticking
my own ideas here--but there's a difference between
an idea that was style-bound and time-bound, that's
part of the large, part of something, that's in the
stream of history there, component of it, and then
something that's larger than that, that is capable
of being developed.
RD:
Uh huh.
SL:
And it seems that through your career you've gone
on to build on those components in your own particular
way.
RD:
Um hmm. This is the only, only thing that makes sense
to me, really, in proceeding.
SL:
Because not every artist who comes from a particular
root knows what to do with it, or is capable of seeing
beyond it or developing. . . .
RD:
Yes, it does, I guess. With me, and I'm sure with
lots of artists, there are moments when you, when
you feel that things are looking pretty repetitious,
and you somehow get set out, set up on the canvas
in a pretty familiar way, and at which time one, in
a given mood, may want to reject this, you know, really
want to stir things up and get off on a totally different
foot, and. . . . Which certainly I've done a lot.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Except almost always it doesn't really--doesn't really
work. I mean, the new beginnings can provide great
excitement for a couple of days, maybe one day. (both
chuckle) And then finally one looks and sees that,
you know, you're really, maybe this work has certain
excitement, but it really isn't about what you're
about. And so it isn't, I don't think it's a pull,
sometimes it has felt to me like a pulling in of my
horns. But to cut back and not insert those--not in
the spirit of inserting those old tried and true things--but
maybe simply in terms of making this thing, this piece
viable, well, so much of the old stuff creeps back
in when one isn't looking, and. . . .
SL:
Do you think of a new piece as part of the whole lifetime
body of work when you make it? Does it have to stand
up and measure up, or make sense in relation to the
rest?
RD:
Oh, I. . . . Well, in some sense, yes. Because I think
what one is about now is, has intimately to do with
what one did yesterday, ten years ago, thirty years
ago. Just as you can continue that progression, what
somebody else did, forty years earlier, a hundred
years earlier, I think that's what one as an artist
probably is.
SL:
Um hmm. Probably an impossible question; I bet I know
the answer already. But--and it's a cliche--but are,
do you think you, are you painting for yourself or
for history or for an audience out there, or all of
that, or none of the above.
RD:
That's a terribly hard question, because. . . .
SL:
Yeah, I know it is. Probably not a fair one either.
RD:
I just don't think. . . . I'm not just sure people
[can] possibly know themselves so well that they can
honestly answer that. I do know that when I'm immersed
in my, in a work, I'm not thinking of anything but
making this work come around. I guess, for me. However,
the (chuckles), the--and to say it is almost embarrassing.
Often when suddenly they, the intense activity ceases
and I feel, "Jesus, there it is! Finally! There
it is!" Then--and this is what I'm saying is
embarrassing--I start thinking, "What am I going
to do with this piece?" I want to get it out,
I want to get it out, show it to somebody.
SL:
Ah, yeah.
RD:
[And, Anyway,] I think that's part of, that's part
of being an artist too.
SL:
Oh sure.
RD:
Unless I'm so, I'm awfully different from other artists,
and I assume that this is. . . . And it's certainly
held up in my lifetime. When I did the "ultimate
locomotive" on the shirt cardboard, at age six
or so, I really wanted to show it to anybody my family
might bring to the house, and things had to stop for
a moment while this shirt cardboard was carefully
looked at. So. So in that sense one might be painting
for others. Sometimes I think I'm--and as I've said--when
I'm really immersed I don't have thoughts like this
at all, but there's a lot of the time when the painter
isn't immersed and the painting is plodding along
and getting together slowly. At times like this I
might think that I'm painting for an ideal person.
SL:
Somewhere down the line, somewhere far into history?
RD:
Somewhere out there, there's somebody that, who I
think is the ideal receiver of what I'm, what I'm
trying to put together.
SL:
That person may not even be born yet.
RD:
Well, maybe he's never going to be born. He's an abstraction,
he's somebody who might be out there, somewhere. And
what were the other possibilities? You said are you
painting for yourself or for an audience or. . . .
SL:
Oh, for history. I was thinking of history.
RD:
Oh, for history.
SL:
Yeah, for that future. . . .
RD:
History. [ruminating--Ed.] Well, in some sense, too,
because I guess I can think of a certain school of
thinking about art which believes that an artist is
doing a "corrective," so to speak, to the
work of predecessors.
SL:
I was thinking, the other day when you were discussing
that you were going to work on a project, that you
had your work to do, and I could sense that, that
either you spend your time this way or that way, and
I thought, "Yes, all the projects are great--and
the interviews and the writing--all that stuff's just
great, but it, if the paintings don't exist it doesn't
amount to anything.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
It's not about a thing. And I've had a very strong
sense that first of all in the beginning there are
the paintings. And that getting them realized and
having them be there is the most important thing.
RD:
Oh yes.
SL:
And all the rest can follow in its wake, and. . .
.
RD:
Absolutely.
SL:
And that, in that sense, I have a sense that there
was a commitment there to making those paintings,
and to have, bring them into being. . . .
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
. . . and that that was historically the most thing.
RD:
Yes.
SL:
And in, it, audience, or whatever, coming maybe far
into the future, but there they are. . .
.
RD: Um hmm.
SL:
. . . and all that content.
RD:
Right.
SL:
Maybe? Sometimes when you don't make things yourself,
in that way, you don't really understand it.
RD:
Um hmm, um hmm.
SL:
That's, I found I'm [moving] to realize that in a
clear way, how important. . . . Anyway, they're intriguing.
I think of all the, you know, very well known, very
important American painters out there, and the pressures
that people describe on their lives, but it doesn't
seem to. . . .
RD:
Pressures [that] what?
SL:
That people describe. I visited deKooning one time
with a friend, and there was such an emporium there.
RD:
Such a what?
SL:
Such an emporium. There were people doing this, and
people doing that, and a procedure to register each
work.
RD:
At his place, you mean?
SL:
Yeah, yeah. It was just, it was like a. . . . It was
like a studio, but it was like a corporation or something.
RD:
I'm surprised.
SL:
It was a, well, it was and it wasn't. There were two
or three people. . . . When something was made, it
was numbered, and measured, and photographed, and
put in a book, and so forth.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
All these things happened to it. And then it was put
here, and then something else happened to it, and
there was this Abstract Expressionist quietude in
the workplace, but right out, a half a step away,
was this whole thing that went on.
RD:
Going on, hmm?
SL:
That was about the world out there, and about. . .
.
RD:
Did Bill look out, or. . . .
SL:
Well, it was just, I think it just. . . .
RD:
. . . reveal himself (chuckles) personally, or. .
. .
SL:
Oh yeah, oh sure, yes. He was wonderful.
RD:
Because I gather--this must have been a while ago.
SL:
This was about five years ago; I went out with a friend
of, an old friend.
RD:
Because I've talked to Elaine [de Kooning--Ed.] fairly
recently, who said that he just doesn't see anybody.
He's just. . . .
SL:
Well, I didn't go there on my own; I went with an
old friend of his who was the same age, who had been
a friend from the forties.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And he was a friend. . . .
RD:
There have to be people taking care of. . . . Or,
maybe there don't.
SL:
Yes, but it was just, I mean, it was quite interesting,
and one could sense that there was this world pressure
and then there was this work place, and then that
there was a real struggle to keep the work place have
a semblance of normalcy and quiet, and. . . . But
the world was right at the door.
RD:
Um hmm. In Robert Motherwell's studio (chuckles),
he has it staffed by lots and lots of people.
SL:
Yeah, yeah.
RD:
And, but he handles it with great ease, and grace,
of course. He's a graceful person. But I, last time
I was there, I was a little nonplussed that. . . .
I think somebody's working on his prints, and in the
next room somewhere, Bob is working. . . .
SL:
That was the same kind of thing.
RD:
. . . and somebody else is doing something with his
collage in the collage room, and then (laughter) somebody's
moving pictures out so we can look at then, and somebody
else is at a desk typing, and. . . . His life is kind
of busy too. . . .
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
. . . doing any number of things.
SL:
It's not exactly the atelier of, that one pictures,
in a classical sort of way.
RD:
No. It's certainly not the Cezanne example that. .
. . (chuckles)
SL:
No.
RD:
But I guess it's certainly the example of a lot of
artists in the past, Rubens being a striking example.
SL:
Curious. Curious and interesting. I just found it
very surprising.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And yet not. You know, yet not.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Perhaps that's there to keep that place quiet.
RD:
Well, there was a little surpise about Bill deKooning.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
That actually there was not activity so close to him--in
the next room as you say.
SL:
In the next wing. It was in the next wing.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
In the same building.
RD:
Same building.
SL:
Right there. But otherwise, he'd be doing all by himself,
which wouldn't necessarily be so wise either, so.
. . .
RD:
Yeah, I know it's not wise for me. But I'd be. . .
. If instead of my tenants downstairs, there was this
crew doing all these things in relation to my work,
and I had to sort of pass that doorway as I came up
the stairs, I'd, it would really ruin my day.
SL:
It would? (laughter)
RD:
I know it's very silly that I. . . . I did for years
have somebody build my stretchers and stretch my canvas,
but now I've even, I've lost those people, and so
I do that myself now, knock down the stretchers. But,
it's sort of silly to be so. . . . (sighs) I'm just
looking at the state of things. I won't have anyone
come in and clean the place, and yet I won't do it
myself, and that's why it's so, you know.
SL:
Well, I think it's grand. I like this much better
than that other, but it's just intriguing to see that.
. . . I found that very puzzling, but then I quite
understood; it was like almost a small industry based
on a person's work, and. . . .
RD:
Which doesn't seem to be in line with what Bill was
about, earlier.
SL:
Yeah. But, I'm sure there are reasons.
RD:
Sure.
SL:
Real good ones.
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
Probably real good ones, too.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Otherwise things get messed up and it doesn't stay
orderly.
RD:
Right.
SL:
It's just that the success and acclaim and interest
and all these things bring their own pressures and
ways of, I guess, coping with them.
RD:
Sure. I remember when deKooning was building his studio,
there was talk about this arrangement of his, for
his easel, where there was a little pit or a slot
where, in the floor, where, so the painting could
drop down. . . .
SL:
Come down?
RD:
. . . and he could paint at the top and not have to
get up on a ladder. This is all hydraulically powered,
way, way up, so that he could paint on the bottom.
(laughter) And a very involved expensive enterprise,
just this easel. Which I just. . . .
SL:
Yeah, it was quite a splendid place.
RD:
It seemed that that man has made a, made. . . .
SL:
Well, I like. . . .
RD:
This is not damning at all. It's just wonder, you
know.
SL:
Yeah.
RD:
That this man could make these changes, because I
know at one time he was like things are here, and
I have these various, I have to unscrew two screws.
. . . [walking away from microphone to demonstrate--Ed.]
SL:
Attached screws, uh huh.
RD:
. . . on that thing and two up there: great big screws
with, in order to make that, the same kind of changes.
SL:
Um hmm, very simply. Well, perhaps, should we go back
to our place in the fifties?
RD:
Sure!
SL:
Is that okay?
RD:
Sure, yeah.
SL:
Okay. Let's see. That was fun. I enjoyed that. If
that was okay for you.
RD:
Okay, I hope we haven't wasted too much time. (laughs)
SL:
No, I don't think so. Okay. We stopped somewhere around
1956, I think, in your evolution, and one of the things
I had written down of that year was your Poindexter
show, that you had at that time.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And I was wondering, who was the director there, and
how was that show received?
RD:
Umm, Ellie Poindexter--and Hal Fondren was her director,
I guess.
SL:
Those were your figurative paintings made in Berkeley?
RD:
No, these were, my first show there was abstract painting
done in 1955.
SL:
Okay, excuse me.
RD:
So it was a fairly large show. She had a gallery at
that time that was, could hold a big--it was a big
brownstone with high ceilings and a couple of ample
rooms. Later she moved uptown and it wasn't quite
the same good situation. And so the show was. . .
. I didn't go back for it! I forget why. The paintings
were accepted, anyway. So I just [have] photographs
of it, but it was well received, and very well received
for a, I guess, for an outlander in New York.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
I got some feedback from it. Nothing elaborate, no
great. . . . I wonder _____ when Dore Ashton, if it
was after that? She gave me the first kind of in-depth
review in Arts and Architecture, and that might have
been in response to that show, which really buoyed
me up, because she was very enthusiastic and it was
just sort of an all-out rave review.
SL:
It was. And she also was coming out of a New York
attitude, I would think.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And so that was nice too, because it really cut it
up at that level and that. . . .
RD:
And I can remember some other kind of snide reviews
that, to the effect that I was well-schooled in New
York painting.
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
I might be from California, from the sticks, and yet
I was very well acquainted with what real painting
was about. Very snide.
SL:
Yes. Pretty good for an outsider, huh?
RD:
Yeah, I'd made a real study of the people, good strong
first-generation people there.
SL:
And yet the structure of your painting was very different.
RD:
Well, that wasn't said. (chuckles)
SL:
In '57 you took part in the first Ferus show?
RD:
Umm.
SL:
You had a painting in the opening show of the. . .
.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
I wonder, how did you get connected with those folks,
and how did that happen?
RD:
[Around this time in the tape, Diebenkorn appears
to have moved away from the microphone, making many
of his words indistinguishable--Ed.] Well, I guess
it was in 1954 that Walter Hopps--and I guess Craig
Kaufmann--visited me--visited my house--in Berkeley,
and they had big plans for down here, and they were
going to put on a show--which maybe they did--in the
merry-go-round on the pier?
SL:
Oh, I've heard of that, yes.
RD:
I didn't ever see it, and I was never sure when it,
exactly when it occurred, but I was in touch with
them. And then I was--what was the date of that, of
the Ferus opening?
SL:
'57.
RD:
'57. Well, so I'd had two exhibitions with Paul Kantor,
'52 and '54.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
So my work was, it was known here. And then for the
opening of the Ferus show. . . . I don't think they
asked me. . . . I kind of think that the painting
they used was Gerry Nordland's painting that he'd
bought from me when he visited, when we first met,
in Albuquerque. I think that was the one, but I'm
not, I'm not absolutely certain.
SL:
So it didn't really, they didn't come up and contact
you and tell you what their plans were?
RD:
Not for the Ferus, no. And then, I didn't have anything
further to do with Ferus. I guess Clyfford Still,
who I think had nothing further to do with Ferus,
was also included in that, at that opening show. So.
And I guess the _____ with some of the Ferus people
I know, Billy Al [Bengston--Ed.], who had been a student
of mine, I guess when the exhibition recently, Returned
to Ferus, or. . . .
SL:
Yes, the one they did in Newport, Last Time I Saw
Ferus.
RD:
Yeah, I think I, that's the [one I] saw. I think Billy
Al came out with a statement to the effect that ["Why
this _____ _____? Why don't you, you never had a _____
_____ [with] Ferus." _____ _____. So it was certainly
_____ _____.
SL:
But you were in that, in that first show?
RD:
I was in the first show, yeah.
SL:
But it, there wasn't a, you weren't particularly part
of that social scene, or any of that at the time you
were. . . .
RD:
No.
SL:
You were up north and. . . .
RD:
I'm trying to think.
SL:
Kienholz was running the gallery at that time.
RD:
I didn't know Kienholz then. I didn't know Hopps.
And I knew Bengston. I had a Bengston hung in my studio.
I think I knew. . . . Oh, well, I knew Craig Kaufmann,
for his having visited with Hopps. I don't think I
knew anybody else. I didn't know [John--Ed.] Altoon.
I never met Altoon actually.
SL:
Huh. Even, I guess, had he died by the time you came
down here?
RD:
I think he had. I'm not certain. He came down here
in '66. I think he had. . . .
SL:
I'll have to look it up and see. So, it was called
Objects in the New Landscape.
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
Did, and you didn't see that show, I gather?
RD:
No, I didn't see the Ferus show. I did go to Ferus
once, on a visit down here. I think there was an Altoon
show up, and I think that was the first time that
I was aware of Altoon.
End
Tape 7
[Tape
8, side A]
RD:
. . . I was aware of the Ferus Gallery down here and
the, that there was something of great interest going
on in L.A., but I looked at it from afar and. . .
.
SL:
Yes. But prior to that, there were other galleries
here though that you had good, a good feeling about:
Kantor's Gallery, and maybe. . . .
RD:
Kantor's.
SL:
Did you know Landau? Felix Landau? Have any contact
with those people?
RD:
I. . . . I guess I'd met him, but I didn't, I don't
remember ever talking with him at any length until
we moved down here, in '66.
SL:
Did you ever know John McLaughlin?
RD:
I met him--oh, possibly the year he died, or maybe
just the year before--at an opening.
SL:
Did you, do you have any feelings about his work?
RD:
Oh yes. I. . . . "My feelings about his work."
I just think it's work of great quality and I think
he's a first-rate painter. And, but when we met, I
don't know, he just seemed very gruff, and we shook
hands and had a few words, and I. . . .
SL:
Openings are probably. . . .
RD:
. . . gave homage to the older artist, told him that
I admired his work, and that was about it. But I never
really knew him. I used to hear about him from Nick
Wilder, and apparently Nick was very involved.
SL:
I guess so.
RD:
. . . with McLaughlin and his life.
SL:
It seems remarkable that he did what he did, at that
time here, in L.A.
RD:
Oh yes indeed.
SL:
. . . that's quite inspiring to all of us, I guess.
RD:
Uh huh.
SL:
But he apparently--oh, I don't know; I wasn't here
so it's hard to say--but, that the regard in which
he's held now seems to be, to have grown quite a lot
and. . . .
RD:
Um hmm!
SL:
. . . the awareness of his work in the community.
RD:
Um hmm. And it's curious that when he was in his prime,
I guess I hadn't even heard of him! Maybe I would
have if I'd lived down here, but I certainly hadn't
heard of him in San Francisco [or] at Berkeley.
SL:
And he didn't have a national profile at all.
RD:
No, not at all.
SL:
Not, I don't know how much locally. Good for him,
to do that. . . .
RD:
Yeah. Yeah.
SL:
. . . and keep his view. In '60, 1957, excuse me,
you had, Herschel B. Chipp wrote an article for Art
News that was well known, "Richard Diebenkorn
Paints a Picture."
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
And then you, that was a part of a long series of
articles that were profiles of artists--in their studios--those
two years.
RD:
Yes, uh huh, right.
SL:
And I wonder how did, how did it feel when that thing
happened?
RD:
Well, I felt, the painting I did turned into a, I
suppose an attempted tour de force, never too interested
in the painting as it finally, the finished picture
that they reproduced in color, in the article. The
whole thing was a bit artificial, I felt, or it became
so. Another kind of artist might have handled it easily,
but. . . . There was a marvelous woman photographer
who took--who lived in Berkeley at the time--who took
the black and white pictures. She was in my studio
a bit, and she kind of expected me to be working while
she was there, which I can't work when somebody's
there, especially with a camera.
SL:
Um hmm.
RD:
Just most self-conscious thing, so here's the picture
I'm dealing with, and I've got a paint on it and make
a, you know. . . .
SL:
It's really. . . .
RD:
. . . really kind of destroy it in order to be photographed
painting on it, and so that was difficult and I guess
Herschel wanted to be around a little bit while I
was working. He was very good, actually. But he made
several visits in the process of the picture. I would,
we would, I'd show the work at its present state to
him, we'd talk about it, and. . . .
SL:
Which was, I guess, the format of those. . . .
RD:
Which is hard too, because I don't like to show pictures.
. . . Pictures that aren't done embarrass me. So.
SL:
It wasn't a particularly enjoyable thing.
RD:
And then the thing came out and here everything I
said somehow seemed overamplified. It was, there was
nothing untrue. But, and it wasn't Herschel that did
this, it was just somehow a lot of things that I said
being amplified in, as happens in print. It just made
me very nervous.
SL:
Apparently they did quite a number of those and. .
. .
RD:
They did a lot of them.
SL:
It's almost like the last gasp of action painting.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. And then, I know that, Tom Hess asked
me to do, asked me to do this on the basis of my first
show there, which was abstract.
SL:
Ah hah.
RD:
And then, I know there was disappointment, that there
were, they were actually going to do "so-and-so
paints a picture with a figurative". . . . (laughter)
And that was very good of them not to say. . . .
SL:
Sort of toss you out?
RD:
. . . sorry, but we don't want to do it after all."
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
Good of them, or maybe they, maybe this was sort of
newsy exposure of this fallen artist. (laughs a belly
laugh)
SL:
Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that sincerely.
RD:
Oh well!
SL:
But that was a curious format, but there were some
notable, I mean, it was a very prestigious series
of articles to be part of, I would think, it would
seem, looking through the magazine. I looked through
it to see.
RD:
Um hmm, I guess they did, did those so-called first-generation
people, were they?
SL:
Um hmm, I guess they did.
RD:
Were they done? Was Rothko done?
SL:
I don't remember Rothko. I know deKooning was in there.
RD:
DeKooning was done, I know.
SL:
Yeah, and. . . .
RD:
I doubt if [Barnett--Ed.] Newman was done.
SL:
I don't think so. [Ad--Ed.] Reinhardt was in it.
RD:
Reinhardt, yeah.
SL:
So it was of nice company, and that was my historical
reason for asking, though, your reaction to the process.
It's interesting.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
It is an awkward thing to ask somebody to do.
RD:
Well, I think some artists handle it very well. I'm
sure that David Hockney wouldn't be thrown. (laughter)
The more the merrier in his studio.
SL:
Remember the film of [Jackson--Ed.] Pollock painting?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Ever seen that? And how, what a painful thing that
was.
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
That was not, I'm sure that was not the nicest thing
that happened. In 1960, you had an exhibition at the
Pasadena Art Museum, one-man show of sixty works.
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
From '52 to '60. It was curated by Tom Levitt, and
was that the largest show you had up to that time?
RD:
Umm, I think it was.
SL:
It seemed that it might have been.
RD:
There was also a small retrospective in Washington,
D.C., that Gerry Nordland did. Was that before Tom's
or afterwards?
SL:
I'd have to look and see.
RD:
Oh, it doesn't really matter, but you asked me was
this the largest show that I'd had up to date.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
If it's before Gerry's, Gerry Nordland's, then it
is.
SL:
Okay. Let's see, you had one in '60 at the Palace
of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
RD:
Sixty. . . .
SL:
And then at the Pasadena Museum, the same year, '60.
And then the Phillips Collection, '61, was that the
one that you're thinking of?
RD:
No, it wasn't at the Phillips. I'm trying to think
where. Gerry Nordland was the director of, of . .
. Washington Gallery? Let's see. And I did, we were
in Washington for that. Oh, oh, it's this show, '64.
SL:
'64.
RD:
Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Gerry was the director,
and he traveled to the Jewish Museum. Oh, and then
to Newport, yes, and. . . .
SL:
[unintelligible phrase] So the Pasadena Museum show
then was a. . . .
RD:
That would have been the largest, yeah.
SL:
. . . that would have been the largest after that
point. Okay. The next notation I have is. . . . I
know we discussed this a while back and I remember
it was very interesting, your recollection of it,
when you went to the Soviet Union, on that trip and
the things you had seen there. You went as a guest
of the Soviet Artists' Congress, through the State
Department? Is that right?
RD:
I was a guest of the Artist's Union.
SL:
And how did that happen? Did you know someone there?
RD:
No, I forget how it happened. I forget who asked me.
Somebody in the State Department. But of course I
accepted. (smiles)
SL:
Yes.
RD:
I was. . . . I was going to say I was teaching at
Stanford--I was artist-in-residence for a year there,
and I guess it was '64. Is that right? It doesn't
matter. So I forget how it came about. And we talked
about that? We talked about. . . .
SL:
Oh, way long in '77, about that.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
I remember you mentioned seeing the Matisses and the
Shchukin collections.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And some of those, some of that seemed to linger in
the paintings of the next year or so.
RD:
Oh sure, yeah.
SL:
And it was a very special. . . .
RD:
It was a real marker in my. . . . It was just a great
trip, it just changed my head in--in a lot of ways,
I think.
SL:
You stopped in Moscow?
RD:
I knew you were going to say that.
SL:
Yeah. (laughter) I remember it was quite intriguing.
It seemed to me it was an important thing.
RD:
It was somehow some expanding experience for me, not
just in the art way. And I met the. . . . The cultural
attache in the embassy in Moscow was Bill Voors. Phyllis
and I were about to visit he and his wife; he's the
ambassador to Prague, to Czechoslovakia. And we have
talked about that, I guess.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
And that he was, he and his wife--who he's not with
any longer--they were just marvelous to be with there,
as, when that was possible.
SL:
Did you go through a lot of the, did you see not only
what was up but things that were in storage?
RD:
Yes, um hmm, yeah. At, not in Moscow, but in Leningrad
did, at the Hermitage. We went through the, saw all
the modern painting that they didn't show, actually.
I guess maybe they have it up now.
SL:
I hear they have some, yes.
RD:
And what was brand new at the Hermitage was, was the,
I guess, the Shchukin paintings, lots of Matisses,
and there were a few Cezannes, Gauguin. And beautiful
galleries, just wonderful upstairs galleries, and
perfect light. Then unfortunately the large Matisse
Music and The Dance, were too large for the galleries,
so they were in stairwells. Maybe they're still situated
there. But you left the gallery, say, to go downstairs,
and here was this really, [down to] concrete stairwell,
and then on the stairwell was either, depending on
which end of the galleries you were, was either The
Dance or Music, not very well lit.
SL:
Music was. . . .
RD:
And then the, at the time, too--I understand things
have changed a lot with the presentation of the collection
at the Hermitage, but then everything else was just
appalling. It was really surprising that this special
[home] was made for these pictures, whereas the pictures
downstairs were hard to see, badly lit, a huge Velasquez
of Philip the Fourth, I guess that's. . . .
SL:
Rembrandts and all kind of things, huh.
RD:
Which you couldn't see, because it was in what had
been a chapel, and here was the large Velasquez and
the only lighting, there was a bit of light coming
through dingy windows, but then the only real light
was a single bulb hanging on a long, long, long cord,
swinging in the draft.
SL:
Tacky, oh, awful.
RD:
The only light for it! So here it hung, this lightbulb
hung down to about where the top of the painting was,
and you can imagine the illumination, and then the
painting had varnish on it, so you would sort of dodge
around the room and see this piece, that piece at
a time, on this whole, on this big surface. You'd
never see the whole thing at once. So that was the
worst one. But then there were Rembrandts that you
could hardly see. And so that was at the Hermitage,
and such a feast on one hand, but such a terrible
disappointment on the other, and then this marvelous
stuff upstairs, for the post-Impressionists.
SL:
It seems. . . .
RD:
And then, but the Moscow Galleries were better, because
the collection had been split between Moscow and Leningrad.
And what really disturbed me was the Matisse Triptych,
the Moroccan Triptych. There were two of them in--I
forget how the split went--but there were three, two
in one place and one in the other. I thought, "Oh,
my gosh, they don't know that those three go together.
. . .
SL:
They don't have all three. . . ?
RD:
. . . or they, each museum insisted they have a piece
of that Triptych or what. And that, I read recently,
those three are together now. They're either both
in Leningrad, or both in Moscow.
SL:
There seem to be some paintings when you came back
that were very emphatically recollective of those
Matisses.
RD:
Yes.
SL:
And I wonder, had that trip reinstated his presence
strongly in your mind, or. . . .
RD:
Um.
SL:
Was there something. . . .
RD:
At about this time, the representational thing, the
figure thing, was kind of running its course. It was
getting tougher and tougher, and at about the time
of the trip--maybe it started before, or maybe it
was right afterward--things really started to flatten
out, in the representational. Five years earlier I
was dealing with much more traditional depth, space.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
And so either right after the trip or just before--I
think just before because some of this stuff I did
when I was at my studio at Stanford, were. . . . Well,
things were flattening out, in, well, I'm relating
this to Matisse, because of course the Matisse's painting
was much flatter in its conception than my representational
painting in mid. . . . At the very beginning it was
fairly flat, but as I went on, I began becoming. .
. . So it was really regressing, then. (chuckles)
SL:
It was rather painterly, too, wasnt' it. . . .
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
Was it in that middle period, that there was a lot
of paint on the surface?
RD:
Yeah, and so that's in the sort of mid-point in the
representational thing, that's when I had the exhibition
in Hilton Kramer, of his article about--which was
a very, very ambivalent article, if you can recall,
if you've read it--where on one hand, he affirms the
painting, and on the other hand feels that it's this
impossible falling-back to a Manet or a. . . . I forget
what the name of that article was.
SL:
I did read it a while ago.
RD:
At any rate, after I returned from Russia, then we
came down here almost immediately. And the painting
I did here, the, really flattened out, and so it was
like I was really preparing to go back to abstract
painting, although I didn't know it.
SL:
So you. . . .
RD:
So it happened rather, within a. . . . I guess within
a year of being down here, I was doing [first] abstract
paintings again. But in the first year of working,
I did these figurative, representational, and pretty
flat and. . . .
SL:
So you moved then in '66?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Right. That, was that a big surprise to people around
you up there?
RD:
That I. . . .
SL:
That you decided to make this change after being a
northern Californian for so long?
RD:
You're talking about the style change or the physical.
. . .
SL:
Move to. . . . No, the physical move, physical.
RD:
I guess, I suppose some of them didn't know quite
what to make of it.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Why would I go to L.A.? "That place."
SL:
But what, was there a. . . . Had that been brewing
in your mind for a while, before you actually did?
RD:
I guess ever since. . . . I think I came down here
in 1961. I think those are the dates on the early,
earliest Tamarind photographs. I came down as a guest
of Tamarind. And that was the first time that I'd
been down here. And really responded to Los Angeles.
Because I had pretty much gone along with, I guess,
my father's judgment about Los Angeles being this
big town, and it wasn't a city at all. There was nothing,
no real reason to come down here. But when I came
down for the Tamarind, at the Tamarind Studio, it
seemed like a, [quite] a place to live, and I think
that sort of brewed.
SL:
What did you find that was. . . . Was it people or
art or perhaps both? Perhaps the look of the place.
RD:
Something more abstract than that, I think. The pace.
The attitude, just the things one might pick up in
several days of driving around, talking to people.
Being at Tamarind working, and that other artists
who were there, and printers, and just sort of catching,
in that contact, catching something of their lives
and something of the life of Los Angeles, which seemed--it
surprised me--quite attractive.
SL:
And you went back and thought about it for a few years,
or did you come back and forth?
RD:
Well, not. . . . I didn't go back and ponder and think,
"Well, maybe I'm going to move down there,"
but I was thinking that the place is . . . rather
fondly, and possibly my environment up there is suffering
a little bit, even in contrast.
SL:
Were you still in Berkeley, or were you living closer
to Stanford at that time?
RD:
Well, I guess in '61 I then went back to Berkeley
and worked there, and then, and I think it was, the
school. . . . I was at Stanford for the entire school
year, and we lived in Palo Alto. And so then there
was the Soviet Union and very little time further
at Berkeley. But that incredible thing of getting
up and moving, and. . . .
SL:
Yes, _____ _____.
RD:
. . . moving it all, house, kids, who didn't want
to, didn't want to come down here, and they were just
old enough so that they didn't have to. My son was
in college and, oh, I guess my daughter was in graduate
school at Stanford at that time. So they were both
in school and didn't come down here, and of course
after, they've been here.
SL:
Yes, just visiting?
RD:
Just visiting. But they were not about to become.
. . . Well, my son came down later, several years,
to live with us.
SL:
So you moved to. . . . Were you living then in the
Palisades, is that where you went? Or Santa Monica?
RD:
We lived in, we've lived in Santa Monica the entire
time, really. We lived in another house for a year,
1966. And then had the good fortune to find the place
we have now. So we moved in there in '67.
SL:
So you basically. . . . And then you had a studio
down on the same street here, didn't you?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
On Main Street?
RD:
Yeah, three blocks further south, still on Ocean Park,
closer to. . . .
SL:
From what I gather, there were several interesting
people. [Charles--Ed.] Garabedian was in that same
building with you? Is that right? Or is that not?
RD:
Uhh, no, he took my studio. I think I turned it over
to Garabedian when I left. I don't think there was
anybody in there.
SL:
No. What was this area like when you came here?
RD:
Hm?
SL:
Was it abuzz with artists or was it pretty much. .
. .
RD:
Oh, lots more artists here, yeah, especially further
down in Venice. But there was Jim Turrell, a block
down. There was Sam Amato, and Less Biller across
the street from me, on Main Street, on the west side
of the street. You were asking about who was there?
SL:
And then who was your neighborhood, yeah. Who formed
your neighborhood?
RD:
Well, Sam Francis, was, we shared the second floor
of the building at Ashland and Main. He had had the
whole floor. . . . No, he hadn't. He had the back
space which became mine and he was moving into another
studio--he had many studios, not at, not just in Los
Angeles--but. . . .
[Tape
8, side B]
RD:
There were two large spaces and one small one, and
a sailmaker had the front, large space, beautiful
space. Sam had the back space. Well, Sam. . . . I
moved into the small room and I worked mostly drawing
works on paper there, because it was too small to
do canvases. And he let it be known that when he moved
out of [this, his] back place I could have it, so
I just sort of waited, day after day, working in this
little space, and finally he moved out. And so I moved
into the back space where he was. Then, I don't know,
whether he, I don't know why he moved back.
SL:
Uh huh.
RD:
But he moved back, then took over the front of the
building, where the sailmaker had been. So then there
were five or so years where he was in the front and
I was in the back.
SL:
Quite a core there?
RD:
Huh?
SL:
Quite a core of activity, huh?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Was this the time when Market Street in Venice was
active? Was this a bit, I guess that was bit. . .
.
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
. . . early when those people were down there?
RD:
Yeah, yeah. So what happened down there, in the following
years, was that these movie directors and actors and
brokers started buying these places that had been
artists' studios, on Market Street and Windward and,
well. . . . And pretty soon the good spaces became
so expensive that the artists just had to leave. So.
That happened a few years ago, when most of [it] moved
to downtown.
SL:
Right. Too bad, because it's so nice here.
RD:
Yes. Yeah.
SL:
Lovely light and. . . .
RD:
So now these places are all very anonymous and then
what's in them are these really fancy pads.
SL:
But at that time when you came, was there some sense
of a community of people? Did you pop out on the street,
have coffee, and talk, or was it pretty much each
to his own?
RD:
Not really, just, I was involved with the university
then, and so I saw my graduate students. Some of them
had studios down there, and then there were Amato
and Biller, and I saw them occasionally, saw their
work. But I was really much more involved with the
school, in the school hours, which was about half
my time. So then for my own time, I just went to my
place and worked, and I had no time left over for
socializing or the artists' life or. . . .
SL:
All of that, huh?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
Were you a full-time teacher when you came to UCLA?
Were you teaching full time, a full load?
RD:
Oh yes, yes.
SL:
And this was, had you decided to teach again, or was
the move related to becoming a teacher down here?
RD:
Well, that was the excuse for coming down here, really,
was UCLA.
SL:
And they had, they had invited you?
RD:
Fred Wight visited me a couple of times in Berkeley,
and _____, he wanted me to come down the first time
he visited, and I said I couldn't think of it.
SL:
(chuckles)
RD:
And so then in about, it must have been 1965, he visited
again. I said, yeah, I'd come down.
SL:
I see.
RD:
So that was my excuse to. . . .
SL:
And you were there from '66 to '73?
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
And you were full, you were teaching full time the
whole time you were there?
RD:
Yeah, um hmm.
SL:
Yes.
RD:
Well, full time there is. . . .
SL:
Two courses?
RD:
. . . two courses, yeah. I had, divided my time between
my studio course and graduate students. And the graduate
students, few of them were actually at the university,
because the faculty had taken over their spaces for
their own studios. So I just drove around.
SL:
Really?
RD:
It was very pleasant. Could you take that off for
a minute?
SL:
Sure, gladly.
End
Tape 8
End
Session 3
Session
4
Interview with Richard Diebenkorn
Conducted by Susan Larsen
1987 December 15
[Tape 9, side A]
SL:
I don't either. It's better than a stenographer. [speaking
of tape recorder--Trans.]
RD:
I guess so.
SL:
Okay. This is the. . . . It is December 15?
RD:
I think it's probably the fifteenth.
SL:
Fifteenth. And we're here in Santa Monica, in Richard
Diebenkorn's studio, and it's a cold Southern California
winter morning, and we are finishing the third--fourth?
(chuckles)--session of our interview for the Archives
of American Art. All right. When we left off, we finished
around 1966, and you were still in Northern California?
RD:
Um hmm.
SL:
Yes. And was it that spring or summer that you moved
to Southern California?
RD:
I would have moved for the beginning of the school
year, so it would have been summer.
SL:
Summer.
RD:
And I remember that specifically because we hadn't
had a, we hadn't found a place to live when school
started.
SL:
And where was school--for the record?
RD:
Oh, that was UCLA. And we came down and thought, well,
it'll be a matter of three or four days, so we'll
splurge and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then
time went by and we weren't getting a house, and I
could imagine the astronomical bill that was piling
up, and then school started and I was teaching at
UCLA and living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which
I thought was really incongruous.
SL:
(laughs) Pretty classy.
RD:
Yeah, yeah. But then finally we found a house to rent
that we liked in the Santa Monica Canyon.
SL:
Is it near where you live now?
RD:
It's closer to the ocean. I'm not sure what. . . .
I forget what street.
SL:
Did you come because you were invited by UCLA to teach?
RD:
Yes, I. . . .
SL:
And how did that. . . .
RD:
Hmm?
SL:
Was that something you initiated, or was it something.
. . .
RD:
No, no, it was. . . . Fred Wight had asked me for,
oh, I guess it was about the third time that he had
asked me to come down. And I think he spaced the question
every year or so, visit me up north. And suddenly
it seemed like a place that I really wanted to, to.
. . . I really wanted to live here, and so we came
down.
SL:
What was your image of the art world down here? And
was that an attraction or was it the climate or the
cultural. . . .
RD:
Well, I think, just as the case now, I feel that I've
been in one place too long, and things are wearing
out for me a little bit, and I've. . . . Well, for
now, I've been here twice as long as any other place.
I think I was twelve years in Berkeley. Or, no, more
than that. Lived in Berkeley from 1953 to '66. So,
well, that's twelve, thirteen years. So we've been
twenty-one years here.
SL:
As of '87.
RD:
Yeah. And I. . . . It's always been good to move around,
and I think I just. . . . It wasn't that I was disenchanted
with Berkeley, because I love Berkeley and Northern
California, but I just wanted something new, something.
. . . And I found it. Maybe we went into this before,
because we were at 1966. I may have referred to the
visit to Tamarind?
SL:
I'm not aware of that.
RD:
I had come down to do a stint at Tamarind in sixty.
. . . It doesn't matter, but early sixties. And I
had seen Los Angeles in the new, in a new light. And
there was considerable vitality artistically, as we
know, and the pace was pretty exciting to me. Very
different from north. And so. And then also I had
taught summer school at UCLA several years before
1966. I forget which year it was. So I had two opportunities
to. . . . Before then, I had had the San Franciscan's
kind of superiority feeling about. . . .
SL:
Southern California?
RD:
Yeah, I kind of looked down my nose at L.A. And my.
. . . I know my father had always told me as a boy
that there was just nothing down here. (laughter)
SL:
By nothing, do they mean culturally or economically?
RD:
Just a desert.
SL:
Just nothing.
RD:
Yeah.
SL:
So you came as. . . . When you came, did you come
as a teacher? Did you come as an artist, or as both,
or did one have more precedence over the other [from
day to day]?
RD:
I think at that time I considered myself an artist-teacher.
That's a terrible thing to say. I don't like that.
. . .
SL:
Yeah.
RD:
. . . hyphenated thing at all. It sounds like a terrible
phrase. I've never said it before: artist-teaching.
SL:
Um hmm, um hmm.
RD:
What I meant was that I always felt that | 
