Vija Celmins’ Untitled from 1969 is an exquisite example of the artist’s signature image. Starting in the early 1960’s, Celmins embraced subject matter that is notoriously difcult to depict, and her drawings of a shifing seascape are in some ways her most ambitious. Untitled is a tour de force of drafsmanship, showing her unequalled ability to realize a subject in movement, transparent and consisting of a complex pattern of ever-changing light. Celmins would take long walks on a pier near her studio in Venice Beach, California as she liked being surrounded by the waves. She started taking photographs of the ocean, which became the inspiration for a body of work that she continues to rigorously explore; Untitled is one of the earliest examples from this series. Her approach is similar to Gerhard Richter’s—an artist she
is ofen compared to. Both worked from photographs, but Celmins eschewed the German artist’s blurring efects while trying to reproduce her subject with an almost hallucinogenic clarity. As much as any 20th Century artist, Celmins became dedicated to the practice of drawing. In 1968, the year she began her Ocean series, she started focusing almost exclusively on drawing and didn’t resume painting until 1983. Like all of her drawings, Untitled is not a study for a painting, but a fully realized work that stands on its own at 12 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches, her most frequently used size. In retrospectives of her work, drawings are invariably the dominant medium, as in her breakthrough museum retrospective in 1980 in which an Ocean drawing from 1969 graced the cover of the catalog.
Jackson Pollock, Number 26A, 1948: Black and White, 1948. Enamel on canvas, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © 2016 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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