Review/Art; The Elegant, Playful Images Of Diebenkorn
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: November 18, 1988
QUIETLY and steadily, befitting his work, Richard Dieb enkorn has amassed the respect from peers and critics that few living artists attain. No one deserves it more or has sought it less aggressively than this painter. During a career spanning four decades, Mr. Diebenkorn has transformed himself from a West Coast apostle of the New York School into a maker of figurative pictures and then back into an abstractionist - this time one whose gridded images, awash in soft cool colors, evoke strongly the landscape of southern California where the artist lived until recently.
What the retrospective of his works on paper at the Museum of Modern Art demonstrates is that despite these shifts of gear, Mr. Diebenkorn has been very much the same man, addressing similar problems and achieving solutions of increasing eloquence and certitude. Nowhere does this fact emerge more explicitly than through the drawings, which for the artist have been not merely preliminary to paintings but ends in themselves. Among the 180 objects making up this large and thoughtfully composed exhibition hang works exuding all the poise and polish and the vividness of color that typify the best of Mr. Diebenkorn's canvases.
If they lack the scale of the big paintings, they express an intimacy all their own. The drawings reveal, even more transparently than do the paintings, this artist's unusually painstaking method of constructing a composition - putting together the pieces like so many bits of a puzzle, shifting them around until finally arriving at something improbably, gracefully balanced. Mr. Diebenkorn lets the alterations show so that the completed objects disclose the history of their own making. It is this confessional posture that separates the artist from someone like Piet Mondrian, with whose paintings his works have occasionally been compared. Mr. Diebenkorn frankly admits the fragility of his elegant designs; his is an art entirely without pretense and posturing.
This show, organized and with a catalogue essay by John Elderfield, the director of the museum's drawings department, gives roughly equal weight to the three phases in Mr. Diebenkorn's career. The first, beginning in 1948, stretches from his student days in San Francisco - as a follower of Clyfford Still and then Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning - to 1955, when he adopted figuration as a means, he has said, of infusing discipline into working procedures.
The second period encompasses the drawings of nudes, still lifes and landscapes that preoccupied the artist's attention until roughly 1966, whereupon he transported himself from the Bay Area to the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica and began once more creating abstract paintings. He recently moved again, near Healdsburg, a city in northern California. The exhibition concludes with two works on paper painted there during the past few months, and, like roughly one-third of the objects here, they are on public display for the first time.
From his earliest drawings, Mr. Diebenkorn's distinctive vocabulary emerged - the shallow depth of his imagery, the erasures and pentimenti, the suave crisp hues, the incidental passages shot with bright color, the lines that do not define shapes but have lives of their own. In works like ''Untitled (Berkeley)'' (1953-54), he creates a jumble of forms and then covers them with fields of yellow paint, leaving seductive fissures that reveal the complex machinations underneath while providing a kind of latticework in the composition.
The artist's keen architectonic sensibility dominates the Ocean Park drawings, executed some 30 years later. Yet even when drawing nudes, Mr. Diebenkorn seems as much concerned with the coordination of flat interlocking shapes across the page as he is with describing figures; the women invariably glance away from the viewer, occasionally appearing removed emotionally and almost incidental to the image. Mr. Elderfield emphasizes in his catalogue essay that as a figurative artist, Mr. Diebenkorn remained a Formalist and, as an abstract artist, he keeps the visible surroundings firmly in mind.
If the drawings from the 1950's illustrate most explicitly the influence of Abstract Expressionism on the young painter, they also reveal that he had, early on, developed a fascination with Matisse, Cezanne and Hopper, all of whom remained central to the artist's achievement. Mr. Diebenkorn has apparently also looked hard at the work of many other painters.
With figurative works like ''Seated Nude, Outside'' (1966) or ''Interior With Mirror'' (1967), the resemblance to Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard is most evident. But in ''Untitled (Ocean Park),'' a gouache from the so-called clubs and spades series of 1980-81, the amusing irregular shapes that dance playfully across a white field suggest Joan Miro or even Jasper Johns without ever quoting them directly.
When Mr. Diebenkorn's works were exhibited in 1957 as part of a group show featuring figurative painters from the Bay Area, he bristled. He has always insisted on carving his own niche. As the exhibition of drawings underscores, this has fostered an art of unshakable seriousness, remarkable consistency and gentle persuasion.