Richard Diebenkorn's recent drawings signal a notable shift
Richard Diebenkorn, 59, is by fairly general consent the dean of California painters. A former Marine who began his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, Diebenkorn started as a representational artist in the 1940s, became an abstract painter, returned to the theme of figure-in-landscape in the 1950s and then, from 1967 onward, gradually began to make himself a world reputation with a sequence of essentially abstract canvases that he christened the "Ocean Park" series, after the section of Santa Monica where he now lives. Yet...