Untitled [standing female nude leaning on table] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this drawing of a standing female nude leaning on a table, with charcoal on paper. You can sense him working and reworking the image, almost as if he’s thinking out loud through the charcoal. I wonder, when Diebenkorn was making this drawing, if he felt the pressure of all those other artists who have drawn the nude? He probably did. But here, he doesn’t seem too worried about it. It feels like he’s really trying to understand something about weight and form, and about how a body occupies space. Look at the repeated lines, the soft shading suggesting the curves of her body. It's like he's feeling his way around her form, trying to capture her essence, the essence of the pose. Those marks, they aren’t just lines, they are traces of his looking, his thinking, his feeling. Diebenkorn, like all artists, was in conversation with others across time. We can learn so much from how they saw the world.