Word: diebenkorns
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...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...
...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...
Within limits, the paintings still allude to landscape. In 1970 Diebenkorn was asked to photograph some Califor nia irrigation works, from the air, for the U.S. Bureau of Water Reclamation...
There are perhaps a dozen living paint ers who vindicate painting's claim to be still a major art. Richard Diebenkorn is one of them...