Untitled [two standing female nudes] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of two standing female nudes with charcoal on paper, sometime in the mid-20th century. He worked reductively, scraping back and erasing some areas to create a sense of depth and volume. Look closely at the way Diebenkorn builds up the figures with layers of smudged and hatched charcoal marks. The dark, velvety blacks contrast with the pale, almost ghostly, skin tones. See how the lines are tentative and searching, as if he’s feeling his way around the forms, allowing the figures to emerge gradually from the ground. There’s an ambiguity here. The bodies are present but also dissolving into the surrounding space. The figure on the left is only partly realised, as if unfinished. Diebenkorn’s approach reminds me of other artists who were figuring things out through observation, like Degas. But with Diebenkorn, there’s an added layer of abstraction that anticipates his later work with geometric abstraction in the Ocean Park series.