Knife and Glass

Richard Diebenkorn, 1963

When art critic Hilton Kramer visited the Poindexter Gallery in 1963, he was deeply impressed by the nerve of Richard Diebenkorn’s Knife in a Glass of that same year, a tiny still life hanging amid a welter of larger figurative canvases in the artist’s New York solo show.  “one hardly knows,” he pondered in his review, “wether to embrace its audacity - it is certainly a very beautiful painting - or shudder at such raked esthetic atavism." 

The Not-So-Still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture 

by Susan Landauer, William H. Gerdts, Patricia Trenton