1998 Westfall 1998                          

Stephen Westfall DiebenkornArt in America, Oct, 1998, 1966, 1914

     ". . .

     "The arc of Diebenkorn's career up until that point would be enough to ensure his place in art history. But the most profound developments in his painting lay ahead. The will to abstraction was never far from his figurative work. John Elderfield has pointed out that the anonymity of his figures, especially in their blankness of expression or entire lack of facial features, helped redistribute expressive energy throughout the surface of his pictures. (3)  The master of this figurative formalism is Matisse. In early 1966, a year and a half after visiting the great Matisses at the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in Russia, Diebenkorn saw a Matisse exhibition at UCLA, where he was weighing an offer to come teach. Two paintings in particular bowled him over, View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both from 1914. The first painting interposes a shadowy blue wash over a view from the studio window of the Cathedral across the Seine; each element is roughly indicated with minimal linear gestures that leave their corrective adjustments exposed. The second painting is almost totally abstract, divided into essentially four vertical planes of color that indicate a space receding into interior shadow. These paintings clarified the principal elements--the architectural delineations and perspectives, and the shifting atmospheric planes of color--that distinguish Diebenkorn's epic "Ocean Park" series, which he began in late 1967, a year after moving to Santa Monica.

     "In a beautiful homage to the artist, the Whitney cut away large sections of the wall dividing the "Ocean Park" works from the "Berkeley" paintings and early landscapes, creating a wide corridor that allowed viewers to recall at a glance the tendencies that recur and evolve through each phase. For, of course, Diebenkorn had been pursuing throughout his career those elements that are so isolated and refined in the 1914 Matisse paintings. In her contribution to the catalogue, Ruth A. Fine, concentrating on the representational work, says, "Diebenkorn knew absolutely that what's so extraordinary about drawing from nature, what keeps the experience constantly alive and challenging is that no subject looks precisely the same for any length of time."(4) Partly because of their grounding in drawing, the "Ocean Park" paintings may be the one great body of frontal, geometrically designed abstract painting to give a sense of time unfolding. Diebenkorn's endless tinkerings, erasures, washings over, perspectival shifts, changes in line thickness and velocity form a bridge between his works on paper and canvas.

     "The "Ocean Park" works record a mind saturated with the mechanics and mysteries of apprehending space in landscape and architecture, and with the memory of art. These works show an artist ruminating by touch on a pictorial scale the body can enter wholly. Their address to the viewer is total, as total as painting can be, and yet they seem to keep something in reserve an informed gravity behind all the airiness. This emotional tone permeates all of Diebenkorn's work and may reflect his lifelong struggle to balance his bemused skepticism about obvious passions and his profound faith in the efficacy of pressing ahead with the tools of his practice. I love the scrap of paper from his studio that Livingston quotes: "I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple."(5)

     "The heraldic emblems make a return appearance in the closing chapter of Diebenkorn's work, taking center stage in the early '80s. In the catalogue, Elderfield reevaluates this underrated and under examined last period and analyzes Diebenkorn's tendency to depart from his path at regular intervals. (6) The late works, mostly on paper, were slighted by the Whitney installation (which seemed to be in a hurry to close: even the Ocean Parks looked jammed together). They nevertheless proved enchanting. The Ocean Parks exerted an obvious influence on Brice Marden, and these Diebenkorn collages and gouaches dance with decorative energies which can be seen in the work of such '80s artists as Philip Taaffe and Ross Bleckner. But it's a richer, stranger, more virtuosic and historically informed dance; botanical silhouettes undulate in Minoan rhythms and colors take on a bejeweled Byzantine intensity. The show ends with a small gouache on paper that looks like a morphing of an Ocean Park composition into a mystical Paul Klee landscape. In the upper right-hand corner a black circle floats inside a horizontal diamond like an all-seeing eye, a Symbolist emblem for the reach of Diebenkorn's own vision.

1) Jane Livingston, (ed.), The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, with essays by Jane Livingston, Ruth A. Fine and John Elderfield, Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the University of California Press, 1997, p. 57.

2) Livingston, p. 77.

3) John Elderfield, "Figure and Field," in the exhibition catalogue Richard Diebenkorn, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1991, p. 21.

4) Fine, "Reality: Digested, Transmuted, and Twisted," The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, p. 98.

5) Quoted in Livingston, p. 42.

6) Elderfield, "Leaving Ocean Park,The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, pp. 107-15. "Richard Diebenkorn," curated by Jane Livingston, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art [Oct. 9, 1997-Jan. 11, 1998]; it traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [Feb. 8-Apr. 12], and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. [May 9-Aug. 16]. It is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Oct. 9, 1998-Jan. 19,1999]."

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017