Elizabeth Broun Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 6, 1968. Oil, 233.7 x 182.9 cm (92 x 72 in.). Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith, National Museum of American Art, 2000, 1993, 1968. 1967
nmaa-ryder.si.edu/journal/v13n2/broun.html
"It's a painting with a lot of what we used to call presence and authority, which I now take to mean that it sweeps away the cobwebs of art history and creates its own present. It's almost eight feet tall and exactly six feet wide-about the reach of a grown man. The canvas is vertical, with uneven parallel strips of color that flex roughly at midpoint, the way a figure bends at the waist and legs. Lines vertically divide two of the color strips, until they are interrupted at the middle of the canvas. . . .
". . . Diebenkorn's turn to abstraction began in 1967, the year after his move from Berkeley to a neighborhood of Venice called Ocean Park. This painting, created in 1968, was early in the series that would run for almost two decades, . . .
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"The idea that representation and abstraction are about different things has been a constant topic in the literature about the artist, though writers like John Elderfield have proposed a convergence. Diebenkorn's studio notes refer to the"limited range of possibilities" of abstract painting on the one hand, but also to "another set of things" that abstract painting can bring out-something beyond landscape, still life, and the figure. He said, "I wanted it both ways-a figure with a credible face-but also painting wherein the shapes, including the face shape, worked with the allover power I'd come to feel was a requisite of a total work." Wanting it both ways, he felt, was "an inherent trap." One part of his deep involvement with Matisse was that the older artist had managed to avoid that trap. For instance, he occasionally simply omitted facial features from his figure paintings, a device Diebenkorn also used.
"Over decades, Diebenkorn found other solutions. He once said, "Temperamentally I have always been a landscape painter," so it's reasonable to look to the landscapes first for clues. They tend to arrange bands of color parallel to the picture plane and then introduce at least one plunging diagonal-a freeway, aquaduct, coastline, or railing-with a directional thrust that creates a deep space in the flatness of the painted surface. Diebenkorn can summarize in a single diagonal centuries of knowledge about the way single-point perspective creates spatial illusion. Although his landscapes often are seen from a height or a window, the receding color bands never completely flatten or tilt up to press against the picture plane.
"In Diebenkorn's interiors, converging walls and floor create the same spatial effect, prying open the tight seal of the picture plane to make a room. Usually that room is inhabited. Diebenkorn painted more women than men, and mostly they sit in chairs or read or drink coffee. Their arms and legs are often crossed in gestures echoing the diagonals that create the room space. Sometimes there's no figure but just a chair or table with arms and legs at angles, their contours conforming to the space within the frame. The empty chair seems to "remember" the figure, as if holding a place for someone who stepped away momentarily, or who perhaps left behind an even more profound absence. Diebenkorn discovered so many ways of making up and peopling space that we come to recognize it as familiar and intimate, distinctly his space. Whether a landscape, interior, figure, or abstraction, his world feels experienced and lived, and all of a piece. And so the sloping curves in Ocean Park No. 6 trigger thoughts of bent backs, while the more straightly drawn oblique angles in the same painting evoke the corner of a room.
"Part of the satisfaction of Diebenkorn's work is the way elements that are widely separated in space meet on the canvas surface. He may place a figure so that it just touches-in two dimensions-the corner of a distant window. He aligns figures' heads with the horizon, embedding them visually in the distance even though they occupy a foreground nearer to us. This allows him to open up the plane and occupy the space within, while he's still standing outside the frame and watching from a single vantage point. In Ocean Park No. 6, curves and diagonals sometimes interrupt adjacent straight edges and sometimes are bound by them, an interpenetration of form and space that conveys abstractly the same double meaning. It's as if he were reminding us of life's paradox-that we are at once actors on the stage and observers with our individual points of view.
"Since I first saw Ocean Park No. 6, Richard Diebenkorn has died in 1993, leaving a legacy that is more and more recognized as significant. . . . "