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From most of the drawings at Knoedler's, the image of landscape has receded. It is displaced—though not wholly abolished—by a curious motif Diebenkorn refers to as his "ace of spades," and which does resemble the black pip on that card pushed and pulled out of shape. It is Diebenkorn's way of breaking up the remote geometry of the Ocean Parks; one no longer sees a distant "view" of a whole terrain, but moves closer, toward this lobed and writhing emblem which suggests either body or still life: the curves of a thigh, a buttock or a breast, the petals of a flower rising on its stalk, or—in some of the drawings—the black propped lid of a grand piano. The body image is confirmed particularly in a work like Untitled #45, which is haunted by the swollen, vegetative forms of 1930s Picasso, rather than 1914 Matisse. Of course, the drawings also seem more intimate than the previous Ocean Parks simply because they are drawings—smaller and more provisional, the receptacles of experiment.
Yet they retain a distinctive intensity, quiet and mannered, that goes with their aloof and somewhat ambiguous degree of abstraction. When Diebenkorn wants to set a curve flowing across the paper, its rhythm acquires a detached mellowness, a quality of reverie; this wandering of the hand is constantly checked and inflected by the vestiges of a grid, the angled cuts of straight drawing that survive from the Ocean Parks and are, in fact, a permanent feature of his style. Consequently, the Knoedler exhibition as a whole presents a display of control rare incurrent painting.
Diebenkorn can be clumsy sometimes, and there is a direct link between the dumpy off-centeredness of some of his "ace" emblems and the awkward postures of sun-struck California figures in his paintings from 25 years ago. But that comes from consistency. Part of Diebenkorn's essential tone has always been the way his first pictorial impulses survive in the written-over manuscript of his work. His mastery of his own long-considered syntax has never led him to smooth out the quirks. Diebenkorn is a great stylist, and what gives life to style is a certain disequilibrium. These modest drawings clearly signal an interesting turn in his work. Will a series of paintings on the scale and quality of the Ocean Parks eventually come out of them? One would be rash to bet against it. —By Robert Hughes