Women Outside 1957

Curator: Richard Diebenkorn’s “Women Outside,” painted in 1957, presents two figures against a striking landscape, rendered in oil paint with visible, textural brushstrokes. Editor: The first thing that strikes me is how immediate it feels. The heavy impasto of the paint application makes the canvas thrum with materiality, like I could reach out and feel the build-up of pigment. Curator: The simplified forms certainly possess an immediacy, even a primordial quality. The juxtaposition of these abstracted female figures with the simplified, almost symbolic landscape…it evokes a very primal, perhaps maternal image, connected to the earth. It seems as though they are guarding it. Editor: Interesting that you see guardians. To me, it’s less about guarding and more about being constructed. Notice how Diebenkorn applied and reapplied the paint in layers. I mean, you can almost chart the labor, the artist’s process, in those ridges. He’s showing us how this image—this concept of “woman”—is built layer by layer through materiality. Curator: But wouldn't you say the lack of intricate detail draws us instead toward universal interpretations? These could be any women, anywhere. This almost archetypal representation emphasizes continuity, evoking female figures across art history, even mythology. Consider Demeter in a field of green... Editor: While those historical allusions are undoubtedly present, let’s not overlook the simple means that bring the subjects to life: layers and layers of pigment that are at the same time quite heavy and ephemeral. How remarkable the texture! This isn't a disembodied archetype. It is materially here, now, constructed by labor. Curator: Perhaps it's both. It's through the application of simple, earthy materials that the universal image comes forth to suggest both timelessness and the here and now. Editor: I am content leaving with an awareness of just how deliberately Diebenkorn built the image that gives us pause today.