RICHARD DIEBENKORN: CLOUDY SKIES OVER OCEAN PARK
THE RECENT ABSTRACTIONS THAT Richard Diebenkorn showed at Marlborough are far from outstanding, and if you had expected much from them you would have had to find them disappointing, but they were worth seeing and thinking about all the same. As things go today, Diebenkorn is a curious phenomenon—an artist who has made the big time in spite of the fact that he has never tried to make the “scene.” He is, on the contrary, intentionally provincial and, insofar as his work depends for its substance on the place where he lives, he is even a regional artist as they were in the ’30s. What is perhaps even more anomalous is the fact that he has been content to work always on the same problems. It is true that the “look” of his paintings has changed a couple of times—first when he went from abstraction to representation, then when he went back again—but the change had nothing to do with an awareness either of the pressure of the marketplace, as it sometimes does, or what generally lies beneath that, with the pressure of history. Diebenkorn seems never to have felt any compulsion to do something new: his work has developed, or at least continued, in an unforced and unhurried manner, and while this exemption from certain pressures might very well have been possible had Diebenkorn been working in New York, it would certainly have been more difficult to achieve. At any rate, not having a particularly agile sensibility, Diebenkorn has been able to work comfortably within a particular set of limitations which, in fact, he seems consciously to have chosen. My own situation in discussing his work is an unpleasant and paradoxical one. In the late ’50s (Arts, November, 1959, p. 30) I was one of the first critics outside California to draw attention to his painting, and since then my own inclinations have taken me far more decisively away from the “scene” than I was in those days; but at the same time, I have to say that what makes Diebenkorn’s work increasingly uninteresting is its removal from the current of stylistic history. The statement it makes is doubtlessly valuable and valid in the terms of its maker; but someone who considers the work against the background of what has happened in abstract painting since Diebenkorn reverted to it in the early ’60s is not likely to find that he can himself share that sense of validity and value, because the work has nothing to contribute to the formulation of problems that are by now familiar nor to the advancement of their solution.
Diebenkorn’s is not a complex art and, as I said, it has been concerned with the same problems throughout—in this respect, it is remarkably consistent, despite whatever changes of subject matter may have occurred. If, for example, we consider the biomorphic shapes to be found in Diebenkorn’s abstractions of the early ’50s, we can see that they certainly owed a great deal to de Kooning, but we must also see that the use to which they were put is significantly different. De Kooning had turned to these shapes because he needed some means of loosening and deepening the very shallow depth—as it evolved historically, the increasingly shallow depth—of Cubist space, with its straight lines, clean edges, and (what was worse) planes that tended to annul effects of recession since they were transparent. The shapes de Kooning took from Miró gave his space much greater possibilities for plasticity, and so gave his sensibility more metaphoric room in which to maneuver, too. In Diebenkorn’s early abstractions, on the other hand, the structure is always planar and the planes always parallel the surface. It is true that the value contrasts tend to create an illusion of depth, and this persisted in his figurative works—it is only in the last couple of years that value contrasts have been greatly reduced and in some cases nearly done away with. But this recent development is characteristic of a tendency toward flatness which presumably accounts for the elimination of the Miróesque shapes from Diebenkorn’s earlier representational paintings. Of course, some very emphatic diagonals are to be found in the representational works, and it is next to impossible to use a diagonal without having it seem to angle back into some kind of depth; but I don’t think I’m being merely stubborn in reasserting what I thought in 1959, namely that what these pictures are about is the regular and graduated recession of planes that parallel the surface. I think I was also right to call attention to the fact that the areas in these paintings were so big. I speculated that the reason for this was that, were Diebenkorn to break them up, he would have tended to go back toward a faceted Cubist style and away from a coloristic one. At any rate, the diagonals in Diebenkorn’s latest work have been very largely neutralized: they are sometimes just lines, not the edges of planes, and often they don’t define areas even of color—the “ground” may be monochromatic or the line may simply stop at some point within it, having no architectonic function. Finally, the increasing use of monochrome is also significant, since it indicates how greatly the value contrasts have been reduced.
So, the biomorphic shapes had not been intended to produce the illusion of a greater depth; structure came to be thought of in chromatic terms, not planar; recently, diagonals have tended to serve no spatial function and value contrasts have tended to diminish. What it all means, very simply, is that Diebenkorn’s is an art of surface, and surface necessarily means two things: it means color in the senses of hue and of saturation, and it means size. You could say that what Diebenkorns are about is what Nolands are about, or at least were until Noland’s latest show. At this point I ask the reader to try not to consider the novelty of this comparison but to think instead about its truth. And to be honest I think that comparing Diebenkorn’s recent work with Noland’s is like comparing a goldfish with a shark, as the saying goes. These are confused and tentative statements about problems for which decisive resolutions have been put forward. The fact that Noland’s ideas are so trenchant does not, of course, mean that they are the only ideas possible about these particular problems; but, to return to what I began by saying about the requirements of historical development, it does mean that one has to take account of them in one’s own work, either by incorporating them or by articulating in one’s work valid reasons why those answers or that way of phrasing the questions he put and the answers he suggested are unsatisfactory. For my part I think that Matisse’s way of phrasing the questions in his work of about 1914 to 1917 were remarkable at the time—it was many, many years before those particular lessons were assimilated, but they have long since served their purpose. To me it is simply dumbfounding that an artist painting abstractions today would continue to use charcoal lines, whether one considers them as line, as value, or as hue; or that he would use grays so copiously, or whiten his other colors; or that he would use white in the other ways in which it is used, namely in strips that separate hues or as a monochromatic field that is activated by lines or by strips of color. It may well be that the whites and the grays were suggested to Diebenkorn by the California light, as is often said. Nothing in the paintings provides the viewer with that clue, and in any case—to say what I really think—I don’t see that abstract landscape is a viable mode any longer. On the contrary, for me it is very sad that Diebenkorn is still so close to . . . Edward Corbett and an art of that sort! (I discussed Corbett’s recent work in Artforum, March, 1970, p. 80.)1 At any rate, the color in these paintings is not hue or saturation, but at the same time the way in which it is used doesn’t exclude its being taken as hue or saturation emphatically enough for it to be taken particularly as value, and it is through an analogous confusion that lines are neither strokes nor the edges of planes. Did someone say something about “homeless representation”?
To put it the other way ’round, Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings are no more nor less than qualified abstractions; what accounts for the impurity of their conception is an absence of rigor. In the end one sees that, while working outside the place where it’s at frees one from all sorts of pressures, one of those pressures may be the necessity of seeing the problems one is dealing with clearly. As a general rule, I think that this particular pressure is one it is better to accept.
—Jerrold Lanes
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NOTES
1. My conclusion, which is relevant to the present context, was that “Corbett’s kind of ‘poetic’ abstraction has been left out in the cold by styles that are far more (more authentically) abstract than any which flourished when Corbett was developing his own, and by other styles that are far more genuinely rooted in the experience of things seen.”
