Richard Diebenkorn: Still Life With Emotion : Art: A visit with the artist, who lives quietly in Northern California’s wine country, reveals his feelings about his life and his art.

When Richard Diebenkorn’s retrospective opened last year at London’s Whitechapel gallery, a society reporter asked him how it felt to have his whole life pass before him in the galleries. Apparently nonplussed by the question, he found he couldn’t answer.

Now that same retrospective is here at the Museum of Contemporary Art (through Sunday). The other evening the artist, reached by phone at his digs in the countryside north of San Francisco, was once again asked how he feels about it. He professed himself delighted with the installation.

“Nothing new was learned but I was pleased that practically all the work held up for me as well as when I originally let them go.”

Diebenkorn, who is arguably the greatest painter that modern California has ever produced, is among the most fastidious of artists. He can linger over a work for months, slowly wiping out, overpainting and making subtle shifts until the picture is like penimenti of thought. Then he can take even longer to decide if a picture is worthy of leaving the studio.

“I only let go of things because they are right and I feel enthusiastic about them. There are some flukey things floating about like drawings I’ve given to models and so forth and mistakes where I fooled myself. When I go someplace where there is a bad one it doesn’t matter how many good ones are around or if the thing is 40 years old. My eye goes right to that bollix.”

Diebenkorn worked in Los Angeles from 1966 until 1988, including a tenure of teaching at UCLA. Then the artist and Phyllis, his wife of 49 years, moved back north to an idyllic pastoral spread built in the 1880s in the wine country near Healdsburg. The valley is a saturated green, the structures on the Diebenkorn spread, exquisitely simple and white. It looks like a combination of paintings by himself and Edward Hopper.

Out walking one morning shortly after the move, the artist realized something was clearly going wrong in his body. He underwent heart surgery, a relatively routine procedure. Complications affected his lungs. Now, tall and stooped at 70, he is sometimes obliged to walk with a cane, finds himself short of breath and is only able to work in the studio on small things about three hours a day. He bears the whole business in good spirits, has a couple of vodkas before dinner and tries to get on with it.

More or less trapped in the lush serenity of the Alexander Valley, Diebenkorn welcomes such company as his strength allows. Last summer, an old acquaintance from L.A. dropped in. It was not long after riots had ransacked Lotusland. Diebenkorn was anxious for a first-hand report. He spends much of his leisure time these days reading the detective novels of Sue Grafton. They are set in a town modeled after Santa Barbara. The visitor remarks that Healdsburg rather reminds him of the channel city.

His account of the Los Angeles chaos seems particularly unreal as they sit next to a cobalt blue swimming pool looking across vineyards toward the Russian River, which is invisible-but-present as so much is in Diebenkorn’s painting.

The artist stares mournfully over his glasses and pulls his nose. His hair is still thick and black with a little gray. At such moments he looks neither 70 nor unwell. He looks like the matured evolution of the son of the well-to-do bourgeois family that he is. His father wanted him to be a doctor or lawyer. He went to Stanford where he took an obdurate stand for art.

“Sometimes I don’t feel right about living up here like this with, you know, all that is going on.”

The visitor objects politely. Sending healing art into a troubled world seems to him a noble thing.

“Maybe. But I’m an artist. I like to stay in touch.” There is a long pause not uncommon to Diebenkorn’s conversation. He thinks at least twice about everything he says and often corrects what, on reflection, he sees as imprecision in his own thoughts. He obliquely does so for others.

“I couldn’t live like this anywhere around Santa Barbara.”

The visitor waits for the rest of the thought, which is not immediately forthcoming. Sometimes Diebenkorn seems to want his conversational partner to finish his thought for him.

“Is it that thing that comes across in Ross Macdonald’s detective novels, that aura of decadence that lurks just under Santa Barbara’s civilized surface?”

“Something like that. I read a lot of Macdonald. Now that he’s gone I read Grafton. She gets at the same thing, I think.”

Phyllis calls dinner.

Like every artist, Richard Diebenkorn the person, is inseparable from his art. Both tempt one to one to oxymoronic descriptions like “brash rectitude,” “oblique directness” and “sensuous austerity.”

Diebenkorn embodies California’s claim to a place in the annals of classic modern art. His work thinks back to Matisse and from thence into history, to Vermeer and Piero della Francesca. The artist is one of the few California painters to achieve international stature without immersing himself in the pressure cooker of the New York art world.

His retrospective moves to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Nov. 19-Jan. 24. It has been a gratifying revelation even to those who felt they knew his oeuvre well from the original Expressionist paintings to the then-radical figure paintings.

In Los Angeles, he surprised everyone by beginning his “Ocean Park” series, which continued well into the mid-’80s. Perhaps the most sustained rumination on line, color and surface in the history of art, it is in some ways comparable to Bach’s cantatas. The series returned Diebenkorn to the arms of the nonobjective muse.

Or so conventional wisdom has it. It is the great gift of this retrospective to reveal Diebenkorn’s painting as insisting on one of art’s fundamental but often-ignored truths. To make great representational art you must have a solid abstract substructure. To make great abstract art its superstructure must be underpinned with the sensuousness of nature and the passion of human response.

The work asserts that it is the tension ignited at the juncture of thought and observation that completes art’s numinous experience. Artists who operate with Diebenkorn’s quality of intelligence always seem enigmatic. Hovering on timeless frontiers as it does, his work evokes human emotion without ever being quite clear about the nature of the feeling.

Artists who knew and admired Diebenkorn during his L.A. years tend to fasten on his working methods. He liked to invite colleagues over one at a time to his Santa Monica studio to view new work, one canvas at a time, before it was shipped off to his gallery in New York.

Peter Alexander remembers him sitting in a big soft chair staring at a painting. “His brow would furrow and you could almost hear him thinking, ‘Should I move that line? Do I dare move that line?’ All that thought just to move a line. He engaged you in his seriousness.”

Sculptor Robert Graham said, “He worked completely alone with his back to the view and no distractions. Once I saw a transistor radio in one corner and asked him about it. He said he just had to listen to the Watergate hearings. He clearly felt guilty about the indulgence.”

Artist Tony Berlant fastened on the ethical values behind the work. “He’s so generous, no effort to make the effect is too great. He makes no claim for mystical content but his art is about man’s confrontation with nature.

“He’s true to the Abstract Expressionist tradition. It’s about artists who put all their ambition into the work and believe that will lead them. It’s basic beyond strategies or conscious control. It evokes meanings that can’t be put into words. I don’t understand why his work is so moving, so tender.”

Painter William Brice is among Diebenkorn’s oldest and closest friends. “Young artists innocently tried to emulate the appearance of the Ocean Park paintings. It wasn’t convincing because they are not about appearance. They stand for an accumulation of time like the meanings you build up with old friends. He has power to move you. He is absolutely passionate in belief. And open.”

After considerable thought, painter Ed Moses said, “Diebenkorn is a manifestation of the beautiful. His painting is like human intuition. It is a window of opportunity on The Big Thought.”

The light was fading in Healdsburg as Diebenkorn mused about his work. He talked a bit about how dicey the creative process is even for an artist of his contemplative bent. He reminisced about students who would accidentally create, say, a feeling of the flesh of an arm with just a couple of lines and some pink chalk.

“There is absolutely no way to calculate or explain how such things happen,” he said. “After all these years my own work still surprises me. That’s the real reward.”