A Geometry Bathed in Light

By ROBERT HUGHES

Richard Diebenkorn's recent drawings signal a notable shift

Richard Diebenkorn, 59, is by fairly general consent the dean of California painters. A former Marine who began his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, Diebenkorn started as a representational artist in the 1940s, became an abstract painter, returned to the theme of figure-in-landscape in the 1950s and then, from 1967 onward, gradually began to make himself a world reputation with a sequence of essentially abstract canvases that he christened the "Ocean Park" series, after the section of Santa Monica where he now lives. Yet there was nothing veering or arbitrary about the changes in his approach. Diebenkorn has always been a man of tenacity, deeply conscious of the tradition he works in and the homages to other art that it entails, and he does nothing lightly. When his work shifts, the shift means something. One sees this happening in the current show of Diebenkorn's work in progress, a group of 50 drawings, mostly in gouache and crayon, that went on view last week at Knoedler in New York.

The show marks both a departure and a continuation. Diebenkorn's recent drawings (all are paintings on paper, in a restricted color range keyed to blue) develop, with some diffidence, out of the quasiabstract Ocean Parks. Those works, which have occupied him from 1967 to the present, are arguably the most refined images of the abstract bones of landscape (in the best sense of refinement, which excludes prettiness and weakness) done by an American artist of his generation. Pale blue Pacific air, cuts and slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or throughway--these images of the California coast have found their way into them, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the early 20th century, are Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian.

Landscape is still a presence in the new Diebenkorns; it is not hard, for instance, to see ocean in the tract of blue that fills the lower two-thirds of Untitled #50, 1981, or horizon and the vestige of a grass strip in its ruled bars of white and green. The same handwriting pervades them, a sunken geometry of lines scumbled over and hazed with paint, as though bathed in light and vapor. There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline--mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the tickytack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu--which is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature, whether they suggest actual landscape or not.

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

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