Y
Artist
Richard Diebenkorn
(American, 1922 - 1993)
Date1986
Mediumdrypoint
DimensionsImage: 4 x 4 7/8 in. (10.2 x 12.4 cm)
Plate Mark: 4 x 4 7/8 in. (10.2 x 12.4 cm)
Support: 19 1/4 x 13 1/8 in. (48.9 x 33.3 cm)
Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Plate Mark: 4 x 4 7/8 in. (10.2 x 12.4 cm)
Support: 19 1/4 x 13 1/8 in. (48.9 x 33.3 cm)
Mat: 20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
ClassificationsGraphic
Credit LineGift of Jonathan Abrams and Fay Pfaelzer Abrams, 2012
Object number2012.28.1
DescriptionBlack, imperfect lines create a rectangle and form an abstract “Y’ at the centereMuseum Notes
Richard Diebenkorn was a very important artist working in the Bay Area, who came to New Mexico for a period of two years in order to study at the University of New Mexico. Joe Traugott has described how Diebenkorn and the Abstract Expressionist style he used during his New Mexico years became the center of a pivotal debate among the art faculty at UNM, with modernists supporting Diebenkorn’s style and regional traditionalists who threatened to withhold Diebenkorn’s MFA degree. (Traugott, How the West Is One, Museum of New Mexico Press, 2007) The print Y represents a later phase of the artist’s oeuvre and relates more directly to his abstract work with the landscape as if seen from an aerial perspective. This print is also evocative of his early 1980s series on Clubs and Spades, as well as some of his various geometric Ocean Park works in which diagonals (and thus V and Y shapes) contribute to the structure of the composition. It is in his print work that one can most discern Diebenkorn’s gestural line, and the print Y does echo the black outlines of the New Mexico Museum of Art’s painting Berkeley #15.
On View
Not on view
