Word: diebenkorns
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There are two kinds of painting in it: straight and plate. The straight paintings-pigment on canvas-are the weaker and look like nth-generation abstract expressionism, which, in fact, they are. Their grid and curlicues come out of Matisse via Richard Diebenkorn, suffering indignities in translation: the drawing is sloppy, the color mud. There are also some steals from Robert Motherwell, in the form of maps of Europe with overpainting. Such work is homage rendered as cliché; but then Schnabel's reputation rests more on his plate paintings, layer on layer of broken crockery combined with things...
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...
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...
...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...