Untitled [seated nude facing to her left] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a seated nude in ink and charcoal. The marks are restless. You can feel him searching for the form, rubbing out the lines, going over them again. He uses the paper in the negative space like a color, letting it breathe. There's no background, so she exists suspended in the moment. The dark ink pools ground the figure, anchoring her on the page. Look at the way he's massed the charcoal in the hair, a thick scribbled darkness. Then the thin, scratchy lines that define the curve of her back. He’s interested in the push and pull of light and dark, positive and negative. This reminds me of some of Matisse’s line drawings, where he was able to describe a whole body with the fewest possible marks. Diebenkorn is doing something similar here, but with a rawer, more searching quality. It feels like he’s trying to capture not just what she looks like, but how it feels to be in the room with her. There’s so much openness and ambiguity in the work, it feels more like a question than a statement.