Berkeley No. 8Berkeley No. 8

Computers, like abstract art, speak a new language. Often overwhelming and sometimes unintelligible, the language, once mastered, is as exciting and rewarding as crossing a great river; enrichment may be found on the other side.

For Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), mastering the language of abstract expressionism allowed him to fully express his artistic vision. For most of his life, Diebenkorn struggled to express emotion and movement through the very elements of the painting—texture, color, form, light, and darkness—without the "baggage" of traditional representational symbols, such as human figures or buildings. Diebenkorn also felt an "ethical obligation" to create pure art. And, in fact, Diebenkorn disliked his work being classified as anything other than abstract.

Diebenkorn's Berkeley No. 8 (cover) is an especially appropriate choice for an issue dedicated to the use of computers in medicine. Both use a new language. Computers, like abstract art, allow us to communicate in new ways. Although the message is sometimes ambiguous and unreliable, pleasure can be had in the hunt for the meaning.

Born in Portland, Ore, in 1922, Richard Clifford Diebenkorn, Jr, drew constantly as a child from age 4 or 5 on. His grandmother introduced him to art at a young age; one of her earliest gifts to him was a set of cards featuring the Bayeaux Tapestries. It set off a fascination with horizontal bands and heraldic symbols that would reverberate through his work for decades.

Diebenkorn entered Stanford University in 1940, but before he could receive his bachelor's degree, World War II intervened. As preparation for active duty in the Marines, he was sent to the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly before his departure, Diebenkorn married Phyllis Gilman, a fellow student, whom he had met the previous year. After basic training, the Diebenkorns moved to Quantico, Va, for Officer Candidate School, but Diebenkorn seemed to spend more of his time visiting art museums in the region than learning the strategies of war. This lack of focus on duties may, in part, explain Diebenkorn's dismissal from Officer Candidate School, and he finished out the remainder of the war in the photographic section.

In 1952, Diebenkorn earned his master of fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, having received a belated bachelor's degree from Berkeley in 1949. On the couple's return to Berkeley, where Phyllis was to pursue a graduate degree in psychology, Diebenkorn's artistic maturity began to show itself.

While painting the Berkeley series from 1953 to 1955, Diebenkorn mastered the range and style he had been striving for, devising his own vocabulary within the abstract language. One enthusiastic student remembered, "God damn it, it was pretty strong stuff. . . . He brought us a new language to talk in" (Manuel Neri, quoted in Nordland G. Richard Diebenkorn. New York, NY: Rizzoli; 1987).

Back in the 1940s, Diebenkorn might have relied on the influences of former teachers and other artists, with fluid lines and heavy use of red and black. But by 1954, the time of Berkeley No. 8, Diebenkorn's mature style was evident. He used the horizontal lines that had become a theme in his work, reminiscent of those he saw as a child in the Bayeaux Tapestries. In Berkeley No. 8, Diebenkorn also interpreted his view from an airplane in the early 1950s. After seeing farmland at low altitude, Diebenkorn arranged his paintings similarly, organizing space and color in farmland-like squares and rectangles, a motif repeated throughout the Berkeley series.

The varying shades of yellow and orange in Berkeley No. 8 reflect Diebenkorn's California environment. Like a pointing finger, the painting directs the eye toward the right side of the canvas, as if reorganizing the elements as we watch (much of Diebenkorn's painting was, in fact, improvised). The darker colors suggest a division from the upper half of the painting, as if between earth and sky, separated by a cloudy horizon. But Diebenkorn had always rejected being classified as a landscape painter, a charge he had to debate more than once because his paintings often evoked the comparison. He was not a landscape painter, but if he had been, Diebenkorn pointed out, he would "paint landscapes directly," that is, representationally.

Ironically, Diebenkorn wrote this sentiment the same year, 1955, that he did begin to paint representationally, for the first time in nearly a decade—and the subject of this painting was, of course, landscape. The result was Chabot Valley. Twelve years after Diebenkorn's shift to figurative painting, he switched back to an abstract style. With this shift came Diebenkorn's best-known work, the Ocean Park series. Like the Berkeley paintings, the Ocean Park series incorporates many elements of his surroundings, and Diebenkorn makes much greater use of greens and blues, with solid geometric forms figuring more prominently.

Diebenkorn's shifts from abstract to representational to abstract again, often at odds with what was happening in the larger art world, mark him as a highly individualized yet ethical painter, committed to the "rightness" of his art. Like computers and the Internet, Diebenkorn's work is "pretty strong stuff."

Deborah Flapan is an assistant editor with the division of JAMA Medical News and New Media.—ED.