Untitled [female nude leaning on her left arm and holding her right arm akimbo] 1955 - 1967

Editor: Richard Diebenkorn's "Untitled" drawing from sometime between 1955 and 1967, done with charcoal and ink, really strikes me. It’s a female nude, but the lines are so bold and abstract, almost violent. What do you make of this powerful image? Curator: Ah, yes, Diebenkorn. You see, he's playing with perception here. It's a nude, yes, but almost wrestled onto the page, isn't it? Not idealized at all. Raw emotion in every stroke. Think of it less as a body and more as an exploration of form and the pure, visceral act of drawing. He is making and unmaking simultaneously! Do you feel that tension? Editor: I do now that you mention it. I was so caught up in the starkness that I missed the kind of…struggle in the lines themselves. It feels like he’s searching for something. Curator: Precisely! Maybe not even something specific, but rather the very essence of being, trapped within the boundaries of the paper. A dance between control and abandon. What I find particularly interesting is how close it treads to pure abstraction while remaining grounded in the figure. It’s teetering! Editor: So it’s not really about the “nude” then? Curator: In a way, no. The nude is a vehicle, a landscape for expressing deeper anxieties, joys, or perhaps a little bit of both. Diebenkorn lets us glimpse a very intimate moment – his artistic process. I almost feel as if he made a painting of an ink bleed to create the lines in this artwork. Editor: That makes so much more sense. I initially saw just… aggression. Now I see the vulnerability too. It really adds another layer, a far more exciting complexity to the piece! Curator: Indeed! And isn't it thrilling when art challenges us to see beyond the immediate and embrace that wonderful complexity of feeling?