1976 Buck, Cathcart, Nordland, Tuchman 1976

Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, with essays by Robert T. Buck, Jr., Linda L. Cathcart, Gerald Nordland, and Maurice Tuchman. Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Buffalo, NY, 1976, 1970, 1967, 1966, 1955,

     " . . .

     "In October, 1966 Diebenkorn moved from Berkeley to assume a professorship in the art department at the University of California, Los Angles. He established a studio in a section of Santa Monica which takes its name from an amusement park called Ocean Park. The painting, Window, 1967 is one of the last representational paintings completed prior to the appearance of the new Ocean Park Series paintings, which has occupied the artist during the last nine years. . ."  - Gerald Nordland, p. 40.

     "Richard Diebenkorn's paintings are deeply affected by his immediate environment. "Temperamentally," Diebenkorn once said, "I have always been a landscape painter." . . .

     ". . . This is not to imply the simplistic and misleading formula that the environment shapes the artist and hence, each move in the artist's life automatically caused stylistic change. . . .

     "More recently in Los Angeles, Diebenkorn has created a series of large, reductive, non-objective abstractions combining a new interpretation of structural, formalistic concern with expressionistic and lyrical tendencies continually apparent in his work. The Ocean Park paintings, which the artist has worked on steadily since 1967, represent the most significant accomplishments of his career to this point and are among the major contributions of the past decade to contemporary American painting.

     "These luminous and open works called the Ocean Park series by the painter after the section of Santa Monica where his studio is located, are nonetheless carefully controlled by superimposed linear structure, using both closed form and spontaneity into what the artist himself described in earlier years as "tension beneath calm." The works are the product of concern continually in evidence in Diebenkorn's work with added attention to surface, chromatic range, spatial definitions, luminosity, and resolutions of open and closed form.

     " . . .

     "The first Ocean Park paintings were created in 1967 and the painter has continued to work only in this mode. The origins of the Ocean Park paintings . . . lie in the vast and open landscapes of the American West. In 1970, a few years after moving to Los Angeles, itself carved out of arid land largely dependent on massive water control and irrigation from nearby mountain sources, Diebenkorn was invited by the U.S. Bureau of Water Reclamation to participate in a new program . . . to photograph systems of irrigation . . .

     "It would be mistaken, however, to regard these flattened, richly worked linear compositions as only personal recapitulations of landscape by the painter, for the experience transcends this. . .

     " . . . For a man who had grown suspicious in earlier years of his own dependence on 'gearing up' emotionally to get into each work, the previous transition in 1955 from abstraction to figuration had provided an immediate means of plunging into form and structure as compositional prerequisites. In the late sixties, any topical references is discarded once again with the Ocean Park paintings which, instead, result from the artist's full resolution of creative impulses, a blend of spontaneity and painterly qualities with a deepened sense of emerging structure and space. The analogy remains one of natural truths transformed into personal ones.

     " . . .

     "The Ocean Park paintings depend crucially on the artist's ability to create an alliance - strike a balance - between structural concern and tonal, spatial illusion. Space is 'negotiated' in John Russell's apt term by definition and re-definition of the relationship of line and tonal field. And yet . . . the colors of Diebenkorn's lines and bars are notably ambiguous as well. The vestiges of figure-ground relationships remain in force though now the emphasis occurs in preserving the integrity of surface while wedding surface notation to spatial illusion within. The colors chosen for the linear elements tend to diminish or strengthen their structural role as Diebenkorn wishes while providing him with an important key with which he integrates pictorial elements with the total formal and spatial unity of the work.

    " . . . Flatness . . . locates the works at a relatively fixed distance from us. Spatial illusion depends entirely upon Diebenkorn's masterful handling of luminosity emanating from deep within. . . . Diebenkorn's recent work has by-passed restrictions and limitations inherent to figure-ground relationships in favor of a "cumulative materiality," by which he contrasts form through varied densities. . . The experience of facture is purposely and prominently retained . . . frequent pentimenti . . . are left visible across the work and are integrated into the entire experience of its creation . . .

     "The duration of the facture involved, witnessed in the open, honest character of the works, denies that art is a finished product, readied and presented as such to the consuming art world. . . . Sequences of numbers within the Ocean Park Series disappear, integrated into later works, nascent from the no longer surviving ancestors scraped off or painted over in order to begin afresh. . . .

     "The types of spaces created in the works range alternatively from quite constricted to relatively open and unconstrained examples . . . the Ocean Park paintings are not primarily about the formalism which helps created them but are more concerned with a harmony and integration of various elements of surface, space, luminosity and illusion of depth.

     "Each day when Diebenkorn drives from his home to his studio down the coast, he follows the Pacific Coast Highway in West Los Angeles along the wide stretches of Santa Monica beachfront below the earthen cliffs. The mellow sparkle and soft golden richness of tone bestowed upon this landscape by the California sun are unique. Sam Francis, Diebenkorn's friend and neighbor, describes the effect of light in Los Angeles as "clean and even bright in haze" and he continues to prefer it to all other light he has worked in.

     "The Ocean Parks are a staggering triumph on Diebenkorn's part, summarizing to date a career of concern to turn his experience, sensitivity to observation, and awareness of his immediate environment into a language of non-objective abstraction. The wash quality applied liberally in fields of blues and greens across the surface of many of the works and the wide field of golden color of others contribute to the impression that these paintings are celebrations of the California coast line, ocean and hills virtually at the artist's doorstep.

     "The banding and marking -off of fields is also generally conceived to emphasize vertical format although no fixed linear system defines or predicts color. The large expanses of the loosely worked green and blue fields in Ocean Park No. 54, 60, 64, 66 and 88, built up over the luminous foundations of worked, white grounds are unmistakably conceived in the presence of the sea. The artist's new, recently completed studio near the location of the former one is nearer the ocean and from a back, open porch one can catch a glimpse of the languid, calm Pacific . . . Ocean Park No. 68 presents an unusual note in the series because of its horizontality and brilliant emerald tonalities. Diebenkorn has generally avoided the wide format, the expected horizontality of still life and landscape, in favor of the vertical one more receptive of tectonic concern and tighter space. Many earlier Ocean Parks such as No. 7, 10 and 27 refer to the land and earth in hues of amber and golden brown . . . Ocean Park No. 27, with its pronounced and solid structure, recalls the urban landscapes of the early sixties while Ocean Park No. 10's juxtaposition of both lively and inanimate greys conjures up scenes of brilliant sun breaking over the urban industrial zones of Los Angeles. . . . " -Robert T. Buck. pp. 42, 43 - 48

(Back to Sources)

 Kelyn Roberts 2017