Diebenkorn's Shifting Styles

...It was more sensual, more organic, more directed toward nature, which after all was in much closer proximity...

...Occasionally one suspects an entirely different picture lies beneath the surface, especially when ultramarine scumble shows through flesh, or sunlight lies on grass like custard...

...Lacking in ideology to kick against, realists have become more ambivalent than ever about their subject matter (see "Bringing Back the Portrait," NL, June 20...

...Unless one counts a 1943 student work, his Hopperesque study of sunlit buildings entitled Palo Alto Circle, his career began nonobjectively, and, this retrospective proposes, his true release came after the artist had shackled himself to the representational mode...

...Although widely exhibited here and abroad, and invariably well-received, his art has existed on the edge of American modernism...

...Now 55, Diebenkorn began his public career some 30 years ago as an Abstract Expressionist, switched to figuration in 1956, then went back to abstraction in 1967...

...and Assistant Curator Linda L. Cathcart...

...Upon demobilization, he resumed his studies at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where one of his teachers was David Park, who was then painting nonobjective-ly and was to become a friend and major influence...

...With Diebenkorn, it was the reverse...

...One hesitates to call the figurative period expressionist, since the word's narcissistic overtones cannot encompass Diebenkorn's sense of pure passion controlled and directed outward...

...a lead-colored road winds past white buildings relieved by the green of stubby palms and a red roof...

...In fact, some of the realist pieces seem more automatist than those of the Abstract Expressionist period, an impression confirmed by the artist's remark to Nordland: "I can never accomplish what I want, only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand...

...His "war" turned out to be a quiet one, for he was able to paint during a two-year Marine Corps stint...

...Painters of the New York School, the most important of whom were seven to 20 years older than the Californian, generally began with rather tight figurative works before being liberated by abstraction...

...Diebenkorn's 1964 trip to the So viet Union, where he saw Matisses that had been known only by reproduction (but have since visited this country), is generally considered to be the turning point of his career...

...The canvases done in New Mexico in the early '50s reflect the Western preoccupation with landscape both in their forms and in the choice of hue?mostly earth colors and black, heightened by flashes of white and bluish gray...

...His reversion to abstraction three years later is also thought to have sprung from the Russian experience...

...and Buck...

...Complementing their essays is an interesting commentary by Linda Cathcart on the critical reception accorded Diebenkorn over the years...

...Yet verbally, he too conveyed a certain diffidence: "All my paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression...

...In the perspective of 30 years, they were more disappointing than ever...

...No wonder the critics probed, as Cathcart says, "what they thought was his need to comment on man and his environment and used phrases such as 'the hermetic emptiness of the spaces' and 'the lonely isolation of the figures.' " In art as in politics, the headiness of those days has given way to an atmosphere of uneasy blandness...

...That Che final stark effect is magnificent has much to do with Diebenkorn's excellent draftsmanship...

...The result is what counts...

...He also conceived early (if vaguely) the desire to "paint and draw for a living...

...Especially in the canvases of the late David Park and Elmer Bis-choff—older Bay Area colleagues of Diebenkorn's—the figures appeared incidental to considerations of paint quality and shallow space...

...One might add that they suggest a mature painter who is nourished, refreshed and, at the same time, confirmed in his own direction...

...Diebenkorn himself, however, offers little guidance beyond the standard observations about the abstract mode affording "total artistic freedom," and the assertion that "a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference...

...Diebenkorn graduated in 1943...

...Buck certainly makes a strong case that Matisse canvases of 1912-14 steered the artist in the new direction...

...Cathcart notes that his representational phase was usually treated in terms of "post painterly abstraction" by writers who tended to ignore the figures and concentrate on "the planar geometry of the backgrounds...

...Whatever the reason for the changeover, there is no denying Cathcart's statement that the Ocean Park series transformed him, in the eyes of the art world, from "a good West Coast painter" to "one of the finest American artists...

...Apparently, his parents took the usual stance of appreciating art well enough but not wanting their son to, as it were, marry it...

...Their opposition to his studying painting at Stanford evaporated, though, at the prospect that he might be drafted?World War II began shortly after his enrollment...

...Wyeth and Howard Pyle, and later by the paintings of Frederic Remington...

...Cathcart quotes Peter Selz as writing about the San Francisco scene that its "art was less encumbered than New York art with historical reference...

...Design and color—merely tasteful before—became astonishingly powerful: Chrome sunlight illuminates a table in a blue-black room...

...The artist s canvases give the impression of having grown organically with the very laying on of paint...

...But as I previously had occasion to note in these pages ("Op-rating on Instinct," NL, January 19, 1976), Diebenkorn expresses these qualities with a casual bravado that is wholly American...

...I particularly liked Untitled 1965 (#29), a charcoal study of a woman leaning back in an armchair, for its simple resolution of superbly subtle thrusts and twists...

...It came to New York's Whitney Museum (June 9 through July 17) after stopovers in Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., and will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum...

...The show's well-illustrated catalogue does not solve the riddle of Diebenkorn's relative neglect, but it does provide valuable analyses of the artist's oeuvre by Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of Modern Art at the Los Angeles Museum...

...Its practitioners "were less involved in 'painting problems.' Their work was wilder, less refined, less organized, less concerned with Surrealist metaphor...

...even those painters bucking the mode worked with the nonobjective monkey on their backs...

...Of the painters struggling with observed reality during the '50s and '60s, Diebenkorn was the strongest and most committed...

...And the surge of strength in these interiors and landscapes, with and without figures, makes impressive viewing in the pallid context of contemporary East-Coast art...

...I simply cannot believe this painter has resigned himself to "minimal" respectability...

...There is undoubtedly a compelling feeling in his work for light and texture, plus a marvelous combination of suppleness and awkwardeness in composition—all fairly rare in the native product...

...Born in Portland, Oregon, the artist grew up in San Francisco in comfortable circumstances...

...Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the show originated in Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where it was organized by Director Robert T. Buck Jr...

...Absurd as this emphasis sounds now, I think there was some justification for it at the time...

...Commenting on Diebenkorn's first solo, in 1948, Gerald Nordland notes that "a romantic sense of space and color were brought to the artist's impressive debut...

...Yet if the very beautiful pictures painted on his return reflect the experience, they are still, to quote Nordland, "vintage Diebenkorn...

...Selz, of course, was not implying that anyone rejected avant-gardism: "In 1949, the entire San Francisco Annual was totally abstract, which could hardly be said of that year's Whitney Annual...

...Given his propensity for 10-year cycles, I hope he is even now gearing up for another radical switch...

...Because Matisse, Bonnard and possibly Manet are among the masters who have played a part in Diebenkorn's development, he has occasionally been "charged," in the great battle for an indigenous art, with being overly Frenchified...

...Diebenkorn's pattern of development is therefore of particular interest...

...Among possible reasons for the Californian's failure to achieve greater acceptance, one thinks of the undeclared war between New York and the rest of the country, and of his having always been rather a loner...

...The grip of Abstract Expressionism was such that artistic as well as critical sensibilities were affected...

...Indeed, his sensual chalk, gouache and pen-and-wash drawings deserve an article in themselves...

...Although I had hoped to feel differently, I cannot share the enthusiasm for these elegant horizontals, verticals and diagonals, for the picturesque and exquisitely washed spaces bounded by strips of color...

...Visiting instructors included Clifford Still, the eminence grise of West Coast art, and Mark Rothko, who brought news of the Abstract Expressionism under weigh in New York...

...Judging from the present show, Diebenkorn retained these qualities, despite having been subsequently affected by Gorky and de Kooning...

...Gerald Nordland, director of the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery at UCLA...

...He recalls being stimulated as a child by the illustrations of N.C...

...the overall murk of Corner of the Studio—Sink is sparked by light catching a faucet and a rusty section of pipe below...