Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, and getting there
Richard Diebenkorn is a painter whose output can been seen as having had equal significance in the histories of abstraction and landscape (if those are two separate histories - Diebenkorn makes it hard to divide them). His Ocean Park series is, I think, an underrated achievement in late 20th century painting, a group of around 150 variations hovering somewhere between impressionism and color-field painting, most of them vertical canvases but with an abiding horizon complex, chronicling, in a loose way, the light of Venice, California, where Diebenkorn lived.
I like the attitude of these paintings: studiously attentive without feeling heavy, cool and airy in the middle but finicky at the margins, and - another somewhat eccentric thing in painting - topheavy. Their graded geometry calls to mind Lyonel Feininger and the pastel palette Helen Frankenthaler. Diebenkorn shows, in these paintings, that texture is not always a matter of relief, of building up the canvas by adding more paint. In fact, color and tonal gradation can play just as much of a part in it. Color and texture are so interwoven here, paint thinned and scraped-down to an almost watercolory effect, that the sense of texture is almost, in the end, graphic. The Ocean Parks are sketchy and diaristic and, because of this, somewhat easily let go of, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily a shortcoming.
(Ocean Park series, from top to bottom, left to right, nos. 67, 54, 128, 122, 125, 123)
Those not comfortable with abstraction (I can’t imagine there being many in that category by now) might find the term “landscape” a little hard to swallow. But the connection is not a superficial one in Diebenkorn’s case. Looking at his earlier, Hopper-influenced paintings, one sees both the geometry and, clearly, the landscape element that we still see in the Ocean Parks, only the proportions are reversed.
(below, left to right: Window, Cityscape 1, Horizon Ocean View)
Directly in the middle are his Berkeley paintings. With Diebenkorn the degrees between figuration and abstraction are easy to see, but the stages don’t come as you would expect them to, ie. chronologically increasing in abstraction. The paintings below, which look aesthetically intermediary to me, as if he’d had to instigate a catastrophe to get himself across the break, were actually done before the ones above (which paradox proves how intermingled the styles were for Diebenkorn). In the Berkeley series, the level, stratified geometry (of either of the other groups) is ruptured, but we still see, more literally than in the later Ocean Park paintings, colored fields (and streams, lakes, and beaches). These landscapes have the distinction of representing, to my eye, horizontal landscape planes as well as bird’s-eye views at the same time, all filtered through Philip Guston (in #57 I see it particularly) and Willem de Kooning (in #52 particularly). It all adds up to a pretty handsome earthquaking. In the Ocean Park series, everything has settled back down to a transfixed and liquid balance. But the figurative underpinning, in neither series, is the least in doubt.
(left to right) Berkeley nos. 5, 8, 19, 52, 57…
Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, and getting there
Richard Diebenkorn is a painter whose output can been seen as having had equal significance in the histories of abstraction and landscape (if those are two separate histories - Diebenkorn makes it hard to divide them). His Ocean Park series is, I think, an underrated achievement in late 20th century painting, a group of around 150 variations hovering somewhere between impressionism and color-field painting, most of them vertical canvases but with an abiding horizon complex, chronicling, in a loose way, the light of Venice, California, where Diebenkorn lived.
I like the attitude of these paintings: studiously attentive without feeling heavy, cool and airy in the middle but finicky at the margins, and - another somewhat eccentric thing in painting - topheavy. Their graded geometry calls to mind Lyonel Feininger and the pastel palette Helen Frankenthaler. Diebenkorn shows, in these paintings, that texture is not always a matter of relief, of building up the canvas by adding more paint. In fact, color and tonal gradation can play just as much of a part in it. Color and texture are so interwoven here, paint thinned and scraped-down to an almost watercolory effect, that the sense of texture is almost, in the end, graphic. The Ocean Parks are sketchy and diaristic and, because of this, somewhat easily let go of, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily a shortcoming.
(Ocean Park series, from top to bottom, left to right, nos. 67, 54, 128, 122, 125, 123)
Those not comfortable with abstraction (I can’t imagine there being many in that category by now) might find the term “landscape” a little hard to swallow. But the connection is not a superficial one in Diebenkorn’s case. Looking at his earlier, Hopper-influenced paintings, one sees both the geometry and, clearly, the landscape element that we still see in the Ocean Parks, only the proportions are reversed.
(below, left to right: Window, Cityscape 1, Horizon Ocean View)
Directly in the middle are his Berkeley paintings. With Diebenkorn the degrees between figuration and abstraction are easy to see, but the stages don’t come as you would expect them to, ie. chronologically increasing in abstraction. The paintings below, which look aesthetically intermediary to me, as if he’d had to instigate a catastrophe to get himself across the break, were actually done before the ones above (which paradox proves how intermingled the styles were for Diebenkorn). In the Berkeley series, the level, stratified geometry (of either of the other groups) is ruptured, but we still see, more literally than in the later Ocean Park paintings, colored fields (and streams, lakes, and beaches). These landscapes have the distinction of representing, to my eye, horizontal landscape planes as well as bird’s-eye views at the same time, all filtered through Philip Guston (in #57 I see it particularly) and Willem de Kooning (in #52 particularly). It all adds up to a pretty handsome earthquaking. In the Ocean Park series, everything has settled back down to a transfixed and liquid balance. But the figurative underpinning, in neither series, is the least in doubt.
(left to right) Berkeley nos. 5, 8, 19, 52, 57…
