[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: February 15, 2008]
After reviewing a closed exhibit last week, I am pleased to offer you an extensive show at the Grey Art Gallery which runs through April 5; and which deserves return visits.
Richard Diebenkorn's name has become almost synonymous with his Ocean Park paintings.
This extensive series of large-scale abstracts from the 1970s are associated, of course, with the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica where the artist lived. But the association springs not only from the name, but also from the powerful sense of light, sun and ocean which is preserved even in the process of abstraction.
Serene, un-busy washes of light blue and pink and sky-grey are suspended from the light girders of regular grids. The contrast with the urgent painterly gestures of New York abstract expressionism is distinct. Diebenkorn learnt from the abstract expressionists - notably from Clyfford Still who taught in California - but the Ocean Park works express a west coast - indeed a coastal - sensibility.
Indeed, in the useful Grey Gallery press release, Diebenkorn admits: "Temperamentally, I have always been a landscape painter." All the more interesting, then, to see his cool west coast roaming over the red, rugged landscape of New Mexico in paintings gathered for the first time for a public show.
Diebenkorn arrived to study fine arts at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, aged twenty-eight. His three years there were busy, if this big show of oils, drawings, spiky monoprints and sculpture is any indication. There is even an example of the wood-cut and lino-cut work he did to make labels for bottles of his home-brewed beer.
The sculpture, plainly David Smith-like, is an aside. The meat of the show is his meditation in oils on the physical and emotional colors of the terrain around Albuquerque. Predictably, the palate is strongly red-orange-brown - sand trumps sea and sky. The works also display a looping, haphazard line, which at times seems about to resolve into a signature.
This seems to be the main structural element in the paintings, and if there's a weakness - on one view - it's that the disposition of the ragged planes of color somehow lacks inevitability. The pictures, one feels, are dramatic as they are - but might easily have been another way. At times the surfaces are worked hard, the paint blistered and cracked - "Albuquerque 22" (I think - the titles are repetitive) reminded me of a sandy Tàpies . Elsewhere, the paint starts to thin in the direction of his later misty washes.
I can't remember where I saw a number of the Ocean Park paintings. My bet is San Francisco, at a show there in 1998. The memory has stayed with me, and it's pleasing to have this rare opportunity to see hitherto unsuspected steps from the early stages of an artist's journey.
The Grey Art Gallery will inform you further here. The show requires some patience and stamina, and I recommend following it with a pizza at Otto.
