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Art: California in Eupeptic Color

5 minute read
Robert Hughes

Some landscapes were invented by painters and carry their names. The stone farmhouse on a lavender Proveçnal hill proclaims Cézanne; the shuttered hotel room with a blue glimpse of sea beyond a curlicued balcony announces Matisse. On a less exalted level, can one drive through rural Pennsylvania and not think of Andrew Wyeth? It happens in California too, through the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

If one has admired Diebenkorn’s paintings of the late ’50s, like Balcony, 1958, or View from the Porch, 1959, one comes to see the coastal suburbs of California in terms of them. Parallels of white curb and bright green lawn, the rising streets and bright evanescent houses, the thickly painted figures with features eroded by light, the sharp eupeptic color—emerald, persimmon, rust, ultramarine: the work was a discovery, a naming. For a time most young painters in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Diebenkorn studied and taught art in the late ’40s and ’50s, tried to do it, or something like it.

Landscape as Cop-Out. These paintings, central to the so-called West Coast look, were the figurative works of a man who had once been an abstract painter and would become one again; purist criticism gave them short shrift. Landscape was regarded as the abstractionist’s copout. Diebenkorn’s work was described as abstract expressionism (the New York style par excellence) diluted for West Coast palates. If not unserious, at least it was not major. “It was always a putdown for me in the ’50s,” recalls Diebenkorn, 55, a big, reticent man with a no-nonsense bearing. “There were, one was told, all the New York artists doing strictly abstract painting; but according to Art News I was nothing but a landscapist. I resented being cut out from the rest, some of whom were as much or as little landscapists as myself.”

No fear of that now. Diebenkorn’s retrospective of more than 130 works, originally organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and now at New York’s Whitney Museum, is as masterly a demonstration of a sensibility in growth as any living painter could set forth. He is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn’s best paintings mediate between the moral duty to acknowledge the ancestor and the desire to claim one’s own experience as unique, unrepeatable. In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words “high seriousness” might have been invented.

The curious thing is that, in hind sight, the once criticized swings between abstract and figurative in Diebenkorn’s work seem not to matter. Beyond them, one sees the profound consistency with which he has pursued his essential lan guage as a painter — how the zigzagging pipes under the basin in Corner of Studio — Sink, 1963, relate to the angular chops of dark shadow in his earlier Berkeley landscapes, and are exquisitely refined in the later Ocean Parks; how the vitreous transparencies of his Californian rooms in the late ’50s, gridded by mul lions and tabletops, become the sharp glazed intercuts of Ocean Park No. 83,1975.

The Ocean Parks, the monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967 and named after the Los Angeles suburb where he now lives, have attracted their share of hyperbole. One New York critic likened them to both Rubens’ Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre and Mantegna’s frescoes in the Ducal Palace in Mantua — which may be the silliest indulgence since Truman Capote last compared himself to Marcel Proust. However, they are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the past 20 years.

Hidden by Veils. Diebenkorn.’s art is about sensuous pleasure, qualified and tightened by an acute sense of instability: through the paradise of paint, a San Andreas fault runs. The syntax of Diebenkorn’s marks is delectable in itself.

One is made witness to the process of painting: how this too obtrusive yellow is cut back, leaving the ghost of itself along a charcoal line; how that 45° cut is sharpened, then blurred, then hidden by veils of overpainting. To scan the sur face of a big Ocean Park is to watch these inflections become a kind of transparency, bathing the text.

Within limits, the paintings still allude to landscape. In 1970 Diebenkorn was asked to photograph some Califor nia irrigation works, from the air, for the U.S. Bureau of Water Reclamation.

The landscape was flat, almost a stretched canvas: pages and planes of earth, cross-cut by long ditches. Mixed with the crystalline light and soft brisk colors of the Pacific Coast, that mem ory provided at least some of the material for the Ocean Parks. But not all; the paintings are much more than traditional landscapes.

They are the medium for one of the most exhilarating meditations on struc ture — the tradition being that of pre-1914 Matisse and post-1918 Mondrian — ever conducted by an American artist.

There are perhaps a dozen living paint ers who vindicate painting’s claim to be still a major art. Richard Diebenkorn is one of them.

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