The quiet power of Richard Diebenkorn

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'Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Works'

Eleanor Robbins reports on a show that is travelling across America

Richard Diebenkorn has often been called ‘a painter’s painter’.  His work is greatly admired by artists for its compositional good sense, its subtlety of colour and for the artist’s traceable decision making.  One is mysteriously drawn to his paintings, whether they are figurative or abstract, because they are quietly powerful and very obviously fine.  With the abstract works the viewer is never bludgeoned by brutality of colour or line, but gently nudged and soon intrigued by innovative colour and the feeling of a satisfactory composition or, as someone put it simply, ‘an equilibrium which engages the mind and satisfies the eye’.

 Diebenkorn’s painting is very far from the hard-edged categories of post-war American art such as Conceptualism or the variable versions of Pop art that trace the quickly changing trends of the 20th century. Being in Los Angeles, he had a freedom from all that contention, which gave his painting a freshness and clarity.  He was stimulated by the energy of a lively community of working artists and an active gallery scene, and he could continue to ‘do his own thing’ which gradually evolved into the body of work called ‘Ocean Park’.

Diebenkorn (1922–93) was a West Coast painter, first university educated and then trained at the San Francisco Art Institute.  His interest in painting took him to see all the important galleries on the East Coast, including the Phillips and Corcoran in Washington and the New York galleries where he met fellow artists.  As his painting developed and his reputation grew, the critic Dore Ashton noted ‘his freedom, his unusual sensitivity to landscape and his undeniable daring in both colour and form’.

With exposure in national and international exhibitions, by the 1950s Diebenkorn was a leading abstract painter.  He then turned to figurative painting, widening his repertoire and experimenting with mediums such as ink and watercolour, gouache and charcoal. Then in 1967 he moved to Los Angeles, soon found a studio in Santa Monica (which he shared for a time with painter and printmaker Sam Francis (1923–94)) and ‘abandoned’ figurative painting altogether. His Ocean Park works were numbered and just titled ‘Ocean Park’ (a place that is, and was, a ‘gritty, beachfront’ district of Santa Monica).  The series began from the late 1960s and came to an end in 1988.

The early Ocean Park paintings were praised for their ‘powerful command of expressive structure’. They were mostly vertical and large. Diebenkorn remarked that he wanted ‘a monumental thing’ in order to obtain a special physical involvement with his painting. The artist worked and reworked the canvases, scraping and repainting, building up layers and, at the same time, producing and then preserving a ‘history’ of his intentions, corrections and changes.

Even if Diebenkorn did not aim to capture light and atmosphere of a specific place, his works possess an expansiveness and  the structural definition of a particular kind of landscape.  The artist made use of his experiences in seeing the landscapes of Arizona and Colorado from a plane, on a return trip to California.  He said, ‘ I think the many paths, or path-like bands in my paintings …have something to do with …agriculture going on, ghosts of former tilled fields [and] patches of land being eroded’.

In 1993 in the UK we were treated to a small Diebenkorn show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and five years later the more comprehensive exhibition at the Whitney in New York provided a larger context for the artist’s work (something many had been longing for).  Both shows contained some Ocean Park works, but this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, organized by Sarah Bancroft for the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California concentrate solely on these large, abstract paintings, which are considered the most distinctive and majestic works of Diebenkorn’s career. The exhibition opened in Fort Worth, Texas in the autumn of 2011; it is currently at the Orange County Museum of Art in California, until May 2012, and then moves to Washington, DC at the Corcoran Gallery for the late spring and summer of 2012.

The catalogue Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series does full justice to this aspect of the artist’s career. It is certain to be an important reference for people interested in painting and in the trajectories of abstract art for years to come. There are three essays, each contributing fresh thoughts on Diebenkorn’s own work, on the work of his contemporaries in the Bay Area and, more specifically, on the place, Ocean Park in the 1970s. The essays give an engaging and well-grounded understanding of the painter (more so than one would normally expect in a catalogue of this kind) and they are broad enough to take account of his working methods, to suggest a stylistic evolution for the series and even discuss some of his other artistic explorations.

There are some 145 paintings in the series (not all of them discussed here), most are painted on canvas but some are on paper or cigar box lids. There are also some monotypes and other prints. The presentation and colour reproduction is particularly good, even details such as the grain of the wood panel lying under thin washes of colour allow for detailed examination.  In some illustrations one can just about participate in the artist’s explorations of his material and find accord with his aim for a balanced resolution.  Diebenkorn worked slowly, exploring and searching for what he called ‘rightness’.  He once said, ‘The best thing that has happened to me a few times, maybe quite a few times… [in] completing a picture [was] a feeling that I had…of things coming together, [a kind of stillness]. It has been for me a very exciting kind of stillness.’ 

Such a stillness can be found in a rhythm of mutual relations between the lines and planes and colours obtained by the artist’s exploration and discovery of visual possibilities.  In an early Ocean Park, #43 (1971) owned by the Berggruen Collection in San Francisco (used as a cover illustration) we find curves and diagonals slicing, sometimes defining edges as they travel over and through transparent washes.  Charcoal softens and suggests earlier decisions.  

In the later paintings of the 1980s Diebenkorn works more confidently within a place defined and set at an angle to the edges of the painting. The areas of colour leak and stain into each other meeting at some hinted focus near, but not at, the centre of the painting. Using minute changes in tonality, he gives the flat canvas a sense of being slightly raised or overlapping, and sometimes even a little wrinkled.

Sarah Bancroft and her assistants have presented Diebenkorn’s work with great sensitivity and good sense.  This is a quite special catalogue, enlightening, fresh in ideas and beautifully produced. 

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Works by Sarah C. Bancroft, with essays by Susan Landauer and Peter Levitt is published by Prestel, London, 2011. 256 pp., 150 colour illus, £40.00. ISBN 978 3 7913 5138 4