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 there was nothing veering or arbitrary about the changes in his approach. Diebenkorn has always been a man of tenacity, deeply conscious of the tradition he works in and the homages to other art that it entails, and he does nothing lightly. When his work shifts, the shift means something. One sees this happening in the current show of Diebenkorn's work in progress, a group of 50 drawings, mostly in gouache and crayon, that went on view last week at Knoedler in New York.
The show marks both a departure and a continuation. Diebenkorn's recent drawings (all are paintings on paper, in a restricted color range keyed to blue) develop, with some diffidence, out of the quasiabstract Ocean Parks. Those works, which have occupied him from 1967 to the present, are arguably the most refined images of the abstract bones of landscape (in the best sense of refinement, which excludes prettiness and weakness) done by an American artist of his generation. Pale blue Pacific air, cuts and slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or throughway—these images of the California coast have found their way into them, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the early 20th century, are Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian.
Landscape is still a presence in the new Diebenkorns; it is not hard, for instance, to see ocean in the tract of blue that fills the lower two-thirds of Untitled #50, 1981, or horizon and the vestige of a grass strip in its ruled bars of white and green. The same handwriting pervades them, a sunken geometry of lines scumbled over and hazed with paint, as though bathed in light and vapor. There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline—mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the tickytack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu—which is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature, whether they suggest actual landscape or not.