Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #6 Jed Perl's "Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn"

Richard Diebenkorn, Window (1967)

I’m in a jam. Picks one through five are set. Only slot #6 is open. There are four possible choices to fill it: Richard Dorment’s “Journey from Nebraska” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006), on the Museum of Modern Art’s Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective; Jed Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” (The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2017), on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Matisse/Diebenkorn; Marina Warner’s “At the V&A” (London Review of Books, June 4, 2015), on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Savage Beauty; and Christopher Benfey’s “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ” (The New York Review of Books, June 19, 2014), on the National Gallery of Art’s Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In.

Oh god, this isn’t going to be easy. I love these pieces. They brim with wonderful descriptions. For example:

Once again, after you marvel at the elegance of Marden’s palette of khaki-green, dark gray, and mauve, you step close to examine the brushed surface of each canvas. Once again, the bottom edges are left unpainted so that you see the layer of white under the field of green, a splash of black under gray, scarlet under mauve. The value and intensity of each final color is carefully judged so that no one color is more powerful than any other, creating a sense of classical stability and equilibrium. But that’s only on the surface. For all the painting’s aesthetic decorum, when you walk around to its side you discover smears of scarlet paint on the edge where the canvas is tacked over the stretcher. Like a flash of red petticoat under a haute couture dress, it affords us a glimpse of the emotions the artist concealed, damped down, kept out of sight. [Richard Dorment, “Journey from Nebraska”]

Two of his finest paintings in “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” Interior with Doorway (1962) and Window (1967), feature the humblest of folding chairs. There’s something almost aggressively American about making a folding chair the subject of a large painting. At “Matisse/Diebenkorn,” the Californian’s dark-toned Interior with Doorway is juxtaposed with Matisse’s equally dramatic Interior with a Violin (1918). Matisse, who played the violin, offers a glancing reference to another great tradition – to classical music. I admire Diebenkorn for trading the Old world comforts of Matisse’s violin, its lustrous wooden form set ever so snugly in a velvet-lined case, for the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair. That folding chair, so Diebenkorn seems to be telling us, is all he has to work with. And damned if he doesn’t make it work. [Jed Perl, “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkoen”]

The word ‘deportment’ seems to have vanished along with aspidistras and parlours, but the concept hasn’t: Alexander McQueen’s designs, spectacularly displayed at the V&A in Savage Beauty (until 2 August), changed the way you walked, and not just because you were raised up on jewelled chopines like a Venetian courtesan in a period of acqua alta, or forced to balance like a tightrope walker on feet encased in hulking armadillo shoes, which did for his runway models what pointe shoes did for ballerinas after Marie Taglioni first stuffed her ballet slippers. But while Taglioni became an ethereal fairy, the armadillo shoes and fabric sheaths printed with snakeskins of the last, astonishing McQueen collection, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ (2010), turned their wearers into aliens, creatures of the deep and outer space, something computer-generated from the film Avatar. [Marina Warner, “At the V&A”]

Wind from the Sea was among the first paintings in which he tried to express some of those things. A partially opened window, with billowing curtains decorated with crocheted birds momentarily in flight, almost fills the frame, revealing – through the frayed and disintegrating lace – a view of a field traversed by a curving dirt road, a narrow line of evergreens on the horizon, and a silvery sliver of the sea. The mood of this monochromatic painting, all grayish greens giving way to greenish grays, is timeworn and melancholy, even if we don’t know that among the distant evergreens is a family graveyard, the same one in which Wyeth himself is now buried. [Christopher Benfey, “Wyeth and the ‘Pursuit of Strangeness’ ”]

How to decide? Well, art is in the details (my favorite maxim). That bit about “the blunt, no nonsense power of an inexpensive folding chair” in Perl’s piece is inspired. In a close contest, it’s the difference-maker. Perl’s “Cool, Sublime, Idealistic Diebenkorn” is my #6.