A Time to Brush Up on Life : Richard Diebenkorn, recovering from heart surgery, is eager to return to art

Richard Diebenkorn goes quietly about the business of being Los Angeles’ most renowned artist-in-residence. He is so quiet about it, in fact, that many of his admirers have failed to realize he doesn’t live there anymore. Last spring he moved to rural Healdsburg in the wine country north of San Francisco.

By now, all attentive admirers do know that on Thursday a retrospective of his drawings opens to the public at the L. A. County Museum of Art to remain on view through May 7. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it covers his thoughtfully remarkable career from Abstract Expressionist works of the late ‘40s through the images of brooding figures and landscapes that made him famous, to the seemingly endless abstract Ocean Park Series, which is now surprisingly ended.

The show is an event of singular moment hereabouts since we have not had a good look at Diebenkorn’s art since 1977 when his painting was surveyed at the museum.

Singularity notwithstanding, Diebenkorn regrets he is unable to attend the festivities. Unbeknown to even more of his admirers, the 66-year-old artist had open heart surgery in January. He has been impatiently recovering in Berkeley, holed up in a shingled hideaway house he owns in the university town where he used to teach and where his son and daughter spent most of their childhood.

He pines to get back to Healdsburg, but the doctors want him close in case anything goes awry. As if that were not enough of an ordeal, he somehow let himself be sweet-talked into another one. He will (sigh) be interviewed but no pictures please. And no tape recorders. Allergic to tape recorders.

It’s a sunny false-spring day. He rummages in the back of his Volvo station wagon as the interviewer pulls up in a ruby-red rent-a-car. They see one another occasionally and the writer is surprised how unchanged he appears. Same trim figure with its tall-man’s stoop, same rumpled, casual, off-duty artist’s togs, weedy gray lopsided mustache, horn-rimmed glasses around bright blue eyes and a shock of dark hair. Maybe a little wearier.

A mantle of comfort envelops the old house as artist and interviewer walk in. Two cheerful resident dogs yap hellos at their ankles. Phyllis, Diebenkorn’s wife of 45 years, is on the phone with one of the doctors.

“Can he see you at 4:30?”

Diebenkorn grumbles martyred assent. “So many tests. I don’t know how many gallons of blood I’ve given them.” He points to a little etching on the wall.

“That’s the first thing I did when I came out of the anesthetic. All I could see were those tulips.”

The flowers are rendered in scratchy strokes that convey a woozy, doped vision. Basically, Diebenkorn is a realist who even includes his visceral sensations. As a young reader he gorged on Flaubert and Stendhal. Right now he’s reading Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

“Trash, but fascinating trash. I must confess I can’t put it down.” He likes the way it conveys the brutally narcissistic society that nurtures today’s fetid art world.

They repair to a wooden balcony over the back yard. The artist sits in the shade of an umbrella’d garden table. Behind him plum trees burst with white blossoms. Why is it a surprise that the whole thing looks like a Diebenkorn?

He has been chatting happily, laughing easily at anecdotes, but when the reporter’s notebook appears, he grows wary. He gulps visibly. After all, I got myself into this. Tell him about the operation.

In 1978, the artist--a noticeably healthy type--was informed he had a heart murmur. Not to worry as long as it doesn’t change. Last January, he was out walking the dogs in Healdsburg when he suddenly felt that if he didn’t lie down he was going to fall down, so he stretched out by the road. Later examination showed an aorta was shot.

“They opened me up by cutting straight down the sternum and pried the ribs out like doors. They replaced my aorta with pig’s aorta. Of course I didn’t know any of that at the time. I was out.”

He seems perfectly detached and mildly amused at his own plight.

But such confrontations with mortality are supposed to trigger spiritual insights.

“I expect reflection to take me by surprise soon. For now, I am still aghast. Doctors call up daily for tests. It’s not an atmosphere that creates a reflective climate.”

----

Phyllis appears. She has to go out. Would the visitor answer the phone? Take a message or whatever, but Dick is not to be disturbed.

There are cultural observers in Los Angeles who saw Diebenkorn’s move as a kind of symbolic aesthetic abandonment of the city, an omen.

“I am sorry about the gesture. Uprooting is complex. It’s hard to get the pieces for it together.” He straightens his glasses and looks at the questioner rather imploringly.

“I guess I have to say I was crowded out. I developed a paranoia in relation to so many people. But if I tell you that, then that becomes The Answer.”

He pulls his nose thoughtfully. It is becoming clear that his uneasiness grows from the same desire for precision in words that animates his art and causes him to keep reworking with endless layers and erasures. A single sentence can no more accurately express what he is trying to say than can a single line draw what he is trying to depict.

“Our pattern is not to live that long in one place,” he feigns, trying another tack. The yellow instead of the blue. “Before L.A., we hadn’t lived anywhere for more than 12 years.”

Twelve years bespeaks a kind of steady restlessness.

He was born in San Francisco, April 22, 1922. All those twos. All those overpainted doubled and redoubled images. He says he likes to paint out a motif but not quite so you still know it was there. His art is as ordered and balanced as Roman numeral two but includes at least two experiences at a time.

April 22 is near the cusp of two astrological signs, the fiery adventurous Aries and the loyal, sensual Taurus, so slow to anger.

Diebenkorn lived around the Bay from Sausalito to Palo Alto, did his World War II Marine service in Quantico, Va., studied under the G.I. bill in Albuquerque, taught in Urbana, Ill., sojourned in the Soviet Union and the South of France.

He is one of the few American artists to reach international stature without living in New York.

“I’ve been in New York enough to be afraid of it. Not a fraidy-cat kind of fear, but a feeling it could push me around in ways I don’t want to be pushed around.

“We lived in Santa Monica for 21 years. That’s a long time. Also, things tend to happen in my work when I move. My last year in L.A. was slow, but I assume those slow stretches.”

He had done some work in Healdsburg while the place was being extensively remodeled but mainly “in defiance of all those distracting workmen all over the place.”

Now he is eager to get back, certain he can resume work the minute he does.

Yet like many other artists, he has trouble articulating exactly what it is he is up to in his work. He agrees it creates an aura of harmony and seems pleased when someone notices the disquiet that also haunts it. Agony is hardly one of his themes, but he confesses he churns inside over the making of his art.

“I have this crazy feeling I can’t see myself. I look at it and wonder; what have you done?”

Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with any label ever stuck on his art. In the mid-’50s, he came to notice with landmark figurative images that combined the structural tensions of abstraction and was labeled a “Bay Area Figure Painter” along with colleagues Elmer Bischoff and David Park. He was uncomfortable being bracketed with a movement and even more so when hailed as a leader in a return to figurative art.

“I hated being taken up by the various writers who had had it with Abstract Expressionism and were just waiting to get it over with. That’s why they liked me. Hell of a reason,” he huffs indignantly.

Unlike other artists who are traumatized by retrospectives, Diebenkorn greets them with sanguine satisfaction.

“It’s like getting lot of old friends together for a reunion. I loll around for a couple of weeks afterward, but then I feel guilty and get back to work. My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I’m superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

“I am not unmindful of reward and recognition, but I have always wanted it to come from just doing the work. I really care about painting. . . .”

Diebenkorn cuts himself short, reprimanded by some inner voice. His head tries visibly to disappear into the collar of his pullover.

“I’m painting an image of myself I don’t like. The noble, humble, dedicated . . . I’ve got to get off the hook here.”

The notebook disappears. The Diebenkorns escort their guest out to an excellent lunch in a homey French provincial restaurant where the artist drinks his share of a bottle of Soave with great relish. Diebenkorn loves fine cuisine and luckily his condition allows him free rein.

Back at the house, the phone rings for the umpteenth time and Phyllis once again excuses herself.

“Look at this.”

Diebenkorn proffers a letter written by a stranger who styles himself “a longtime admirer” and requests two autographs signed on post-card reproductions of his work.

“I get more of them all the time. A couple every week. What do you make of it?

Could be anything from sincere admiration to cottage industry. Famous autographs are valuable. There was a story in the news the other day about a brisk trade in baseball player autographs. Diebenkorn demures.

“Baseball players I can understand, but a painter . . . ?”

Phyllis materializes.

“The doctor says we can go home this weekend. We have to come back on Monday, but we can spend the weekend at home.”