ART REVIEW : Geographic, Cosmopolitan Diebenkorn

Once upon a time a journalist telephoned Richard Diebenkorn asking him to comment on an event in the art world. The painter, for all his renown, seemed hesitant. He asked for time to consider the request and called back the next day.

“I have written a statement which I will now read to you. If you can use it, I would like you to use it all. If you can’t print it word for word, please don’t use any of it.” His manner was pleasant, but there was no question that he meant what he said.

Now Diebenkorn has a major exhibition of his drawings and paintings on paper at the Museum of Modern Art, a show which, thank goodness, will come to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in March. The work reflects the same combination of gentle anxiety and flinty insistence on precision and control as that insignificant telephone conversation, proving once again that an artist’s style is himself incarnate.

At 66, Diebenkorn is undisputedly among the most significant painters ever identified with California and certainly its greatest classic modernist. Very tall, with a tall man’s diffident stoop, he is one of those mature chaps you can look at and still see as a young guy. He avoids the art world spotlight, but is perfectly capable of turning up at an obscure gallery opening for an even more obscure painter whose work interests him.

He came to notice as an innovator in the late ‘50s, when he lived in the Bay Area, by combining the tense composition and brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists with images of the human figure. A move to Los Angeles in 1967 marked the beginning of his seemingly endless “Ocean Park Series,” which blended minimalist abstraction with hints of landscape. In short, whatever Diebenkorn is actually doing, he is thinking--or worrying--about what he is not doing.

The result is an extraordinarily balanced and harmonious art that is never either purely formally academic or quite psychologically expressive. It is richly visual, powerfully intelligent and penetratingly empathic. It is an art that reminds you of a man who watches a play with just a flicker of amusement or sadness on his face, while the rest of the theater audience responds mightily. Somehow you know he understands the play better than anyone.

The Modern’s lovely large show proves Diebenkorn one of those rare artists who shows himself virtually complete in his drawings. As a young guy embroiled in Abstract Expressionism he was a somewhat naughtier character than he is today. The odd scatological testicle or breast shape shows up in works of the Sausalito series and occasionally such quirkiness still pops up in funny paintings of playing card symbols for clubs and spades, but they are just amused erotic musings in an art preoccupied with other artists. In the old days he was forever thinking about Hofmann, Gorky or De Kooning as were a lot of younger artists. Unlike, say, Robert Rauschenberg, Diebenkorn was not thinking about how to erase or efface them. He was thinking about how to correct, stabilize and restructure them.

By the mid-’50s Diebenkorn had--as we read the work--decided that AE’s compositional muscularity was for him but not its made-up quality. He wanted to draw something he could actually see and so--along with friends like David Park and Elmer Bischoff--he took to the figure. He hung his hat on the chunky structural girders of Abstract Expressionism while pursuing his habit of thinking about other artists.

“The Drinker” mulls on Picasso’s Blue Period. The wiry line of “Seated Woman Reaching Down” pursues Matisse’s way of making volume read as flat shape. “Seated Man Under a Window” is interested in Edward Hopper’s ability to use a figure like a buoy on the water to define a large empty space.

Clearly, however, Diebenkorn is out to avoid the aura of loneliness we identify with Hopper. If he wanted Abstract Expressionism’s architecture without its bombast, he also wanted the vividness of the figure without the distracting baggage of anecdotal feeling. Or, to put it another way, whatever emotion his figures express is to come from the totality of the composition and not the fact that a face is grinning. Diebenkorn’s numerous drawings of women, for example, range in mood from sexual sulkiness to erotic hostility to benign calm, but you pick it up as seepage rather than narrative.

This avoidance of the literary may account for the fact that German Expressionist art is rarely seen as playing a role for Diebenkorn even though there are sometimes strong echoes of Max Beckmann in the Californian’s meaty line and graphic clarity.

The virtually encyclopedic range of artistic rumination betrayed by Diebenkorn’s art could mark him as an eclectic copy cat but it does not. Partly this is because his art is not infected with the butterfly mannerisms of a dilettante and partly because he approaches other art as a sympathetic critic trying to absorb its architectural virtues and excise its non-visual distractions.

A kind of rigorous self-editing of anxiety and indecision remove the possibility of a hopeless funk, boxing them into zones of such determined purity that they are literally sometimes drawn with a ruler. Ever seeking equilibrium, the art retains enough uneasy trace elements to humanize its leanings to Mondrian-esque purism.

The result is a style of extraordinary geographic and temporal cosmopolitanism. It plays as well in New York or Germany as it does in California. It is equally comfortable holding a discussion with Piero della Francesca, chanting with a goddess from the caves of Ajanta or chatting with an aesthetic engineer about crystalline Cubism. The grounds of refined conversation are an unpretentious picnic in the back yard.

Diebenkorn recently moved back up North to Healdsburg. He apparently likes living in California while having long ago outstripped his identification as a “California Artist.” Yet there is a persistent look about his pictures that puts one in mind of other artists who have worked here from Hassel Smith to Wayne Thiebaud.

Partly, of course, that is because his work responds to the environment, but it is also because he is a type of California artist not always associated with cliches about our hip, eccentric sensual self-indulgence and dingbat visionaries.

Diebenkorn reminds us there is a line of causal aristocrats who work around here living in easy relation to the whole world of high culture while wearing jogging shoes and lolling on the patio--the Sam Francises, David Hockneys and William Brices that prove the joint is civilized after all.

As to Diebenkorn’s move, some of the works at MOMA (to Jan. 10) suggest a somewhat bolder variation on the enduring “Ocean Park Series.” They recall the anecdote about the amateur who asked one of Diebenkorn’s respectful rivals how anybody can go on “painting the same picture over and over.”

“To do that,” said the rival, “you have to be real good.”