Untitled [seated female nude wearing glasses] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this line drawing of a seated female nude, of unknown date, with pen and ink on paper. The drawing takes as its subject the female nude, a subject with a long and fraught history in Western art. What's interesting here, though, is the woman's eyeglasses: they are at once familiar and particularizing, and they remind us that the model is an individual. They create a sense of immediacy and, in the context of mid-20th century American art, we might even call this democratic. Diebenkorn's drawing has a loose, casual quality, as if dashed off in a moment. The image participates in a longer tradition of artists sketching models in a studio, which, of course, is an institution in itself. The studio creates a space where the artist can freely explore questions of form and representation, or, potentially, to make comments on the social structures of its own time. For a deeper look into the conditions surrounding its making, we might want to look at Diebenkorn's notebooks and letters. We can only understand artworks through close attention to their institutional and social context.