Halfway House

"I'm very old-fashioned," admits Los Angeles' Richard Diebenkorn. "Though I'm interested in most of the new art, painting remains for me a very physical thing, an involvement with a tangible feeling of sensation." In that, Manhattan's Robert Natkin would concur. "The giant cool that is part of today's life-style repulses me," he says. "The artist has to have vulnerability, open up his feelings, and find a loving commitment." Though Diebenkorn and Natkin belong to no school and live and work on opposite sides of the continent, their similar approaches to painting have brought them both to a kind of stylistic halfway house between representationalism on the one hand and formal geometry on the other. Both are romantic abstractionists who have preserved on canvas a sense of place and object without the aid of recognizable images.

Damp Light. Oblivious to fashion and personal fortune, Diebenkorn has often detoured when a less determined painter might have rested on a comfortable plateau of achievement. Under the influence of Clyfford Still and the late David Park, he plunged headlong into Abstract Expressionism while a student at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Then, in 1955, he found himself in something of a bind, as he describes it, bored with splashing color around with the total freedom that abstraction allows. He felt a sudden need for "a kind of constraint," and found it by painting the human figure. He thereby ushered in a vital school of Bay Area artists who found a fresh range of figurative interpretation within the loose, easy brushwork of action painting.

So it went until two years ago when, just as casually as it had appeared on Diebenkorn's canvases, the figure disappeared. In its place was a bold structural architecture and a damp soft light suffused with the shrimp reds and spring greens characteristic of Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where he now lives. In his latest exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum, his "Ocean Park" series appears to be at first glance totally abstract. But soon the rudiments of a surfside landscape begin to emerge. Diebenkorn admits that a drive past the beach in the morning may affect his choice of color later in the studio. "As in the past, I seem to have picked up my environment in my paintings."

Somewhat surprised that he does not even sketch from life any longer, Diebenkorn is still searching in his painting for that perfect balance of freedom and license. He explains, "Somehow, if you can put a shape, a space, a color anywhere, that's not good. And yet if it has to go just here so specifically because of things like gravity and time of day and source of light, that gets to be a drag, too."

Gingham Checks. Robert Natkin likes to refer to his beginnings as "early nothing." His father was a rag dealer, and so bleak was the Chicago neighborhood in which he was born 38 years ago, he recalls, that it left him with a lasting sense of esthetic deprivation--a fact that probably accounts for the almost pretty profusion of colors in his present canvases. After studying at Chicago's Art Institute, where he was most influenced by the Postimpressionist collection, he found no galleries in which to display his work.

Natkin responded by opening the Wells Street Gallery in 1957 in which he exhibited his own paintings along with other Abstract Expressionists. With the gallery's demise after a couple of years, Natkin set off with his wife Judith Dolnick, also a painter, for New York. There he achieved modest success in a succession of one-man shows. In September, the San Francisco Museum of Art will give him the accolade of a full-scale retrospective.

His style derives from both decorative Oriental and primitive art and illusionist painting. He may lift details from lace sleeves he has seen in a Flemish masterwork at the Metropolitan Museum and expand them into blown-up patterns, offset these with gingham checks from his wife's summer dress, and counterpoint both with huge pointillist dots. The results look like an explosion in a fabrics factory or a rabbit-hole view of a Wonderland garden.

Natkin admits shamelessly that he wants his painting to portray, with sad beauty, time and a sense of the natural world. Each series has its own literary overtones. His Faust series looks "on the dark side of life," but reflects Faust's gallant laughter in the face of evil. For his "Field Mouse" series (which contains no visible field mouse), he quotes from Ezra Pound:

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass.

Though his abstractions--unlike Diebenkorn's--seem to belong more to the realm of fantasy than fact, Natkin manages nonetheless to stimulate the imagination and guide the eye to a place of persuasive charm that is both abstract and real.

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