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Cup, Saucer, Fork and Knife 1965
| Medium: | Stone lithograph in two colors on light creme-toned paper |
| Sheet size: | 17.25 x 17 inches (43.8 x 43.2 cm), with full margins |
| Image size: | 11.25 x 11.25 (29.2 x 29.2 cm) |
| Printer: | Ernesto De Soto |
| Publisher: | Collectors Press, San Francisco |
| Edition: | 50 plus proofs |
| Edition Number: | 12/50 |
| Signed: | lower right "RD 65" |
| Provenance: | From artist's studio |
$20,000
Cup 1962
Oil and colored pencil on hardboard
Diebenkorn made numerous superb tabletop still life paintings, drawings, and prints during his figurative period (1955-1968). These representational works give closely observed objects the geometries of abstraction. He updated the dreamy tabletops of Bonnard with a muscular ordinariness, elevating familiar, intimate paraphernalia to effigies. He raised the diner ware coffee mug alone to an icon.
Diebenkorn drew, painted, and scraped with a razor Cup, Saucer, Fork and Knife during 1965 in San Francisco at Collectors Press, a small atelier south of Market Street. He ingeniously composed it in two layers: the dark line and wash image, and a semi-transparent ivory colored layer that differentiates the light and shadows. The two layers are so seamlessly unified that one cannot tell where they begin and end.
Halfway through printing the lithography stone, on which the artist drew the image, cracked under pressure of the printing press. The printer, Ernesto De Soto, strapped the stone to hold it together while he finished the edition of fifty. The printer considered the accident to be a valuable historical event of an uniquely beautiful lithograph, equivalent to Goya's thumb print on one of his etchings. The printer did not keep the lithographs in sequential order, so the almost invisible evidence of a crack are randomly numbered. We were fortunate to buy this impression directly from the artist during his lifetime.