1992 (1991) (1993) (1980-1990) (1990-2000) Table of Contents
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, 1992 See Image
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Announcement Santa Monica Arts Division, 1992 See Text
Paul Bonaventura Richard Diebenkorn, L.A. MOCA Brochure, 1992 See Text
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956 See Text
John F. Muller Neglected Neighborhood . . . Santa Monica Daily Press, 4 August 2004, 1, 1992, 1946. 1906 See Text
Andrew Robison, with Judith Brodie, Ruth E. Fine, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Sarah Greenough Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992 See Text
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.) 1992 See Text
Documents
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, 1992
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Announcement Santa Monica Arts Division, 1992
Chain Reaction, Paul Conrad, Artist, Santa Monica Arts Division Post Card, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Postal Meter July 22, '92, $0.19. Addressed to Kelyn Roberts, 2421 3rd St, Santa Monica, CA 90405
"Peace Day! Join the Santa Monica Arts Commission for a celebration of Paul Conrad's 1991 Sculpture Chain Reaction. An afternoon of traditional ethnic and contemporary music and dance featuring Madame Consuma-san Japanese Dance Group, Grupo Folklorico, UCLA Modern Dancers. Santa Monica Civic Center, 1855 Main Street. August 1, 1992, 2:30-4:30 p.m. Free Parking. Sculpture made possible by an anonymous donor through the Santa Monica Arts Foundation. Coordinated by the City of Santa Monica Arts Division. Photography by Ed Goldstein. Information: (310) 456-8350" Santa Monica Arts Division, 3239 Donald Douglas Loop South, Santa Monica, California, 90405
Paul Bonaventura Richard Diebenkorn, L.A. MOCA Brochure, 1992
"Of all of the qualities that distinguish Richard Diebenkorn's paintings, it is perhaps their manifestations of fallibility that attract us to them so strongly. Their looks give us insights into the workings of the artist's mind, mirroring the kinds of decisions, intuitive and spontaneous, which Diebenkorn is called upon to make in the fabrication of a painting: what constitutes the best juxtaposition of colors between one part of a canvas and its neighbor, for example, or the most favorable placement for an arm or a glass or a tree. Most importantly, they show how regularly Diebenkorn is confounded by his own decision-making, how choices made are subsequently adjudged to be inappropriate in the wake of further developments and how frequently they necessitate a degree of new and more inspired thinking to imbue them with the required correctness.
"By approaching paintings as an empirical activity, the artist has chosen to explore picture-making as a series of problems and possibilities. "With each new painting," he says, "I find a way (to go about it) all to soon, and that's when the trouble starts." Although most painters choose to obscure the trial-and-error nature of their craft, Diebenkorn has settled upon a brand of revelatory construction. His adjustments on the canvas take their leads from the precursors and it is entirely fitting that, on occasion, they require the ghost-like showings-through of those first impulsive essays in order to illustrate what was considered too obvious beforehand and what more eloquent options have been advanced with the aid of hindsight.
"As a consequence, the spectator is often aware of a very genuine sense of struggle, of a contest between the wishes and expectations of the painter and the seemingly perverse logic of the picture's components. The presence of restless amendments and rubbing-out in the Ocean Park series and the sometimes copious over-painting in the figurative works stand as a testament not only to a history of frustration and reappraisal, but also to an assiduous honesty, of an approach to painting that marks out the revisionist tendencies of an inquiring mind eager for answers to the questions it puts forth. Diebenkorn's pictorial and intellectual odyssey proclaims an avowed desire "to get everything right" notwithstanding the seeming impossibility of that course.
" . . .
"Any panoramic associations in these unashamedly sensual pictures are perhaps unwittingly reinforced for the onlooker by an understated and atmospheric palette redolent of hazy smog over congested freeways, of shimmering hilltops and parched fields, of dazzlingly reflective pastel-colored walls and freshly watered suburban lawns. Complex and tentative in some instances, straightforward and emphatic in others, the paintings give off a kind of light with which the region is traditionally identified. However, for the artist the heavy-lidded Pacific sunshine is something of which he becomes aware only after periods of activity in the studio. "Non- painters often say, 'What a lovely light here,' but I myself don't see it . . . My own approach is very different. I see the light only at the end of working on a painting. I mean, I discover the light of a place gradually, and only through painting it." In his discriminating avoidance of the easy solution, Diebenkorn has spent the last fifty years searching for the best possible light."
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956
[He] had cotton candy and caramel corn. . . . We went home feeling dizzy from the red flashing lights and bells . . ." p. 263
John F. Muller Neglected Neighborhood . . . Santa Monica Daily Press, 4 August 2004, 1, 2004a, 1992, 1946, 1906
" . . .
"The city's original 1906 charter mandated district representatives and the direct election of the mayor. However, a 1946 charter reform set the current system, in place, under which the seven council members are elected at large. A city-commissioned study in 1992 found that the change was partially designed to exclude a growing black population in the Pico neighborhood from political power. . . ."
Andrew Robison, with Judith Brodie, Ruth E. Fine, Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Sarah Greenough Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992
" . . .
"Unique treasures from Crown Point Press are three working proofs for Diebenkorn's Combination, 1981 . . . which the artist altered by drawing and/or collage as he developed the image. He considerably modified the forms and made major shifts in color, converting the green field to a reddish one and in reverse changing a red tone in the spade form at the upper right to a green. . . .
" . . .
"Artist Sam Francis made a generous gift of fifty-five prints to the National Gallery last year. Particularly exciting is his untitled work of 1983 . . . our first of Francis' very beautiful monotypes. It is one of an important group of unique images printed from woodblocks . . . in the early 1980s. Francis' strong colors and powerful forms were printed from multiple pieces of plywood, irregular in shape and size, that were laid onto a wooden base, and together they functioned as a matrix. In combination with areas of intense color, Francis used ghost images made from wood that had previously been printed in other works in the series; the thin film of ink that remained achieved gentle modulations of pale tone that heighten the wood grain. His loose painterly marks result from splattering color directly on his matrix as if on canvas. The balance of Francis' gift is a little-known series of self-portraits of penetrating intensity as as wonderful humor, printed in etchings and lithography during the early 1970s.
"Another generous artist-donor last year was June Wayne, the founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which was active in Los Angeles from 1960 to 1970. In addition to facilitating the art of lithography for hundreds of others, Wayne also accomplished an impressive corpus of her own prints. This year she donated twenty-five of these dating from 1951 to 1987 to fill gaps in our collection . . . including the portfolio Solar Flares, 1983 . . . Brilliantly colorful, Solar Flames, Solar Burst, Solar Flash, Solar Wave . . . and Solar Refraction are printed on paper bearing the artist's own watermark and enclosed in a Mylar wrapper that acts as title page and colophon.
" . . ."
Richard Diebenkorn (b. 1922)
Sam Francis (b. 1923)
June Wayne (b. 1918)
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.) 1992
The Light of L.A.
"But light is over!" Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at MOCA, . . . "There hasn't been light in this city for more than ten years now." [He organized Helter Skelter, a show] . . . to prove precisely that in 1992. On first arriving in L.A., in 1981, Schimmel had half expected to encounter some third- or fouth-generation version of the Light and Space orthodoxies that had come to be so closely identified with the L.A. art scene during the sixties and the early seventies-through the hegemony of masters ranging from Robert Irwin* to Richard Diebenkorn*. Instead, he found a younger generation of artists-exemplified by the likes of Mike Kelley and Nancy Rubins-who seemed to have rejected the light aesthetic entirely, opting instead for a decidely darker, seedier, more grimly unsettling and dystopian view of the L.A. realtiy. "Partly," Schimmel speculated, "this was because by the late seventies and early eighties light in L.A. had been so academicized that it had really become little more than a commercial cliché. There was nowhere else to go with it. In part, too, long before a lot of other people, these artists were onto some of the bleak social transformations that were eroding the city itself. Helter Skelter closed on a Sunday, and the worst riots in the city's history erupted the following Wednesday."
"Of course, in its very title, the Helter Skelter show acknowledged the fact that its countervision of the L.A. reality was itself rooted in a long countertradition-one that wended back from the Manson murders into the noir world of the great crime novelists and filmmakers of the thirties and forties. It's interesting how those noir novelists and filmmakers almost completely inoculated themselves against the blandishments of the light of L.A., in part by setting most of their scenes either at night or indoors-in fact, usually both. . . "