God is in the vectors. by Robert Hughes. Time,
12/08/97, Vol. 150 Issue 24, p98, 3p, 3c
THE LUMINOUS ARCHITECTURE OF RICHARD DIEBENKORN'S PAINTINGS
Foot for square foot, the current retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's
paintings at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art offers more
aesthetic pleasure than any other show--at least of contemporary art--in
town. Which isn't to say the Whitney has done the subject full justice.
Its heart being where it is, the museum needed lots and lots of space to
present a mass of trivia and threadbare junk from the Andy Warhol Museum
in Pittsburgh, Pa., pointlessly documenting the pallid maestro's effect
on advertising and fashion, under the title "The Warhol Look/Glamour Style
Fashion." So the Whitney's out-of-house curator, Jane Livingston, found
the space for Diebenkorn whittled down to one floor and a small entry gallery
of the museum, which is nothing like enough for a just overview of the
man's pictorial achievement.
Except for an excellent show of his drawings curated by John Elderfield
at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, never
had a fair deal from New York museums. The city's cultural establishment
viewed him as, well, a California artist--a bit of an outsider, a bit marginal,
insufficiently difficult or radical, too easy on the eye, whatever. Diebenkorn,
one of the most flintily self-critical artists who ever lived in America,
took this in his stride, and his oeuvre (closed, alas, too early) handily
answers his detractors. Nobody who cares about painting as an art--as distinct
from propaganda, complaint or "cutting edge" ephemera--could be indifferent
to Diebenkorn's work or to the long, intense and fascinating dialogue with
the modernist past it embodies.
Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, Diebenkorn was raised in San Francisco
and got his first art education there--a process interrupted by his enlistment
in the Marine Corps. This, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise,
since he was posted to Quantico, Va., and while there was able regularly
to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting
there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916.
Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse
(and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist
pantheon) for the rest of his working life, this particular Matisse, with
its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled and inspired him: "I noticed
its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet the surface
is right there...right up front."
Discharged from the military in 1945, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California
School of Fine Arts. Over the next several years, he moved between the
East and West coasts. His work from the late '40s to the early '50s was
essentially abstract, though with strong overtones of landscape space and
color. A considerable influence of Willem de Kooning bore on it. De Kooning,
Diebenkorn felt, "had it all, could outpaint anybody, at least until the
mid-'60s, when he began to lose it." But Diebenkorn's friendship with the
Bay Area painter David Park, who bravely refused to accept the reigning
dictum in the American avant-garde that radicalism had to mean abstraction,
pointed him still closer toward the figurative.
By 1957, Diebenkorn's figurative phase was well and truly under way,
all its parts integrated, in landscape, figure painting and still life.
But it's necessary to realize, and the show makes this quite clear, that
for all his shifts between degrees of abstraction and figuration, Diebenkorn
remained essentially the same artist; he wasn't someone trying on different
suits to see which ones fit.
In hindsight one can see the components of his culminating achievement,
the Ocean Park series, forming in a small, early landscape like Seawall,
1957. First, the clear marine light that seems to bathe all the forms,
whether sharply cut (the tawny beach and wedges of black shadow on the
left) or vaguer (the tract of scribbled green grass on the right). Second,
Diebenkorn's decisiveness about tonal structure and the way sharp contrast
can be used both to hollow out the space of the painting and to create
a firm, flat pattern. And third, a breezy lyricism of feeling that was
especially Diebenkorn's, an exhilaration at the material fullness of the
world, translated into terms of pigment.
Edward Hopper was one of Diebenkorn's inner jury of admired masters--no
other American painter except de Kooning influenced him as much. What he
liked in Hopper, Diebenkorn once laconically said, was "the diagonals."
Not the mood: you can't extract a Hopperish melancholy from Woman in a
Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be thinking doesn't
count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence
of vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky,
the tabletop rushing away to the right at a shallow angle, the triangle
of the arm propping the head, and the woman's left hand drooping over the
upper arm, its slack spiky fingers echoed in the red-and-blue stripes of
a cloth draped over the chair arm. All these angles, beautifully integrated,
give the image an architecture that solidifies the passing moment, a firmness
to which Hopper's diagonals pointed the way.
This virile structure enabled Diebenkorn to explore all manner of nuances,
shifts of tone, transparencies and textural quirks in the areas of color
it defined. It let the picture bear provisional or openly corrected passages,
without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle. Structure was the key,
not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy
as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly
more than visual nouns--a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies
in it; a knife in another glass, bent by refraction--rendered with the
immediacy and verve one associates with Manet's asparagus and peonies.
The precondition of his structure, in turn, was drawing. Diebenkorn
drew incessantly. It wasn't only that he belonged to the last generation
of American artists to be raised in a culture of drawing. He loved the
act. Drawing was sifting the world's disorder. It was making sense of random
agglomerations of things, unconscious postures of the body. (In all his
drawings and paintings of his wife Phyllis, you only rarely get the sense
that she was actually posing.) Every painter has favorite shapes and gestures,
which, unless they encounter some resistance, can turn into mannerisms.
Diebenkorn's style certainly grew some mannerisms, but drawing--the continuous
friction against obdurate motifs--prevented them from getting ingrown,
turning into tics.
The climax of Diebenkorn's work was, by general consent, the Ocean Park
series, which he began in 1967. Ocean Park is part of Santa Monica, the
beachside suburb of Los Angeles where he had his studio. From its high
crystalline light, its big calm planes of sea and sky, its cuts and interlacings
of highway divider and curb and gable and yellow sand, Diebenkorn produced
a marvelous synthesis that, though prolonged through more than 140 large
canvases, had very few weak moments.
In the Ocean Parks, with their pentimenti and layering left exposed
to view, one sees the summation of Diebenkorn's admiration for Matisse's
way of leaving the picture with the traces of its own making. This reworking
leaves an impression of curiosity, not indecision. The paintings are broadly
brushed and then "tuned" by passages of fine, but not fidgety, detail.
The color, glazed or discreetly scumbled, is luminous--now diffuse like
sea fog, now hard and bright as direct sun. The Ocean Parks radiate an
Apollonian calm, an uncoercive authority. They are the creations of a man
with a fully integrated temperament, candid but not showy. There is nothing
else quite like them in modern painting, in America or the world.
~~~~~~~~
By ROBERT HUGHES
Form:
Oil on canvas, liberal use of non-local color and an impressionist palette.
The brushwork is quick and loose and more suggestive of form than truly
descriptive. He uses bright touches of saturated color. There are two figures
facing each other, both standing. Between them is a table with a lamp on
it, the lamp has a yellow lamp shade.