Word: diebenkorns
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Landscape as Cop-Out. These paintings, central to the so-called West Coast look, were the figurative works of a man who had once been an abstract painter and would become one again; purist criticism gave them short shrift. Landscape was regarded as the abstractionist's copout. Diebenkorn's work was described as abstract expressionism (the New York style par excellence) diluted for West Coast palates. If not unserious, at least it was not major. "It was always a putdown for me in the '50s," recalls Diebenkorn, 55, a big, reticent man with a no-nonsense bearing...
...fear of that now. Diebenkorn's retrospective of more than 130 works, originally organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and now at New York's Whitney Museum, is as masterly a demonstration of a sensibility in growth as any living painter could set forth. He is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn's best...
...curious thing is that, in hind sight, the once criticized swings between abstract and figurative in Diebenkorn's work seem not to matter. Beyond them, one sees the profound consistency with which he has pursued his essential lan guage as a painter - how the zigzagging pipes under the basin in Corner of Studio - Sink, 1963, relate to the angular chops of dark shadow in his earlier Berkeley landscapes, and are exquisitely refined in the later Ocean Parks; how the vitreous transparencies of his Californian rooms in the late '50s, gridded by mul lions and tabletops, become the sharp...
...Ocean Parks, the monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967 and named after the Los Angeles suburb where he now lives, have attracted their share of hyperbole. One New York critic likened them to both Rubens' Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre and Mantegna's frescoes in the Ducal Palace in Mantua - which may be the silliest indulgence since Truman Capote last compared himself to Marcel Proust. However, they are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the past 20 years...
Hidden by Veils. Diebenkorn.'s art is about sensuous pleasure, qualified and tightened by an acute sense of instability: through the paradise of paint, a San Andreas fault runs. The syntax of Diebenkorn's marks is delectable in itself...