Art Review : Gallery’s Curtain-Closer Merits a Look : Worthy Hockney-Diebenkorn Exhibit Is Finale for BankAmerica’s Costa Mesa Facility

For those who remember the lavish party in 1989 that opened what was then the Security Pacific Gallery, news of the impending closure of the BankAmerica Gallery--as it has been called since the corporate takeover in 1992--may have sounded like yet another instance of an art venue vanquished by the recessionary ‘90s.

In fact, BankAmerica’s massive contemporary art program--a 22,000-plus collection of objects and a suite of galleries at the bank’s world headquarters in San Francisco--remains intact. But the Costa Mesa offices are being leased to a subsidiary of Unocal Corp., and BankAmerica has been obliged to look for another gallery space in Southern California.

As a venue for work by well-known artists, the BankAmerica Gallery will be missed, though its exhibitions from the corporate collection--dominated by established national and international artists--lacked the sense of discovery associated with the Security Pacific days when curator Mark Johnstone scoured Southern California studios to stock his themed shows.

The final exhibition (through Aug. 11), “Hockney & Diebenkorn: A Print Survey/Selections From the BankAmerica Corporation Art Collection,” is worth catching particularly if you’re a fan of the transplanted English artist famous for his love affair with Southern California’s swimming pools.

The pairing of Hockney and Diebenkorn was inspired, as both were influenced strongly (albeit in different ways) by the serene, color-saturated work of Henri Matisse. His paintings are not, needless to say, part of this exhibition; perhaps someday a museum able to borrow key works will organize a show about contemporary artists who found the French modernist’s vision particularly appealing.

This show does offer a generous overview of Hockney’s style. He is represented by 21 prints spanning 1972 to 1985 and including a range of floral still lifes, naturalistic portraits and decorative quasi-abstractions.

Born in Yorkshire in 1937 and educated there and at the Royal College of Art at London, Hockney quickly made a name for himself as an inventive draftsman. With his eye for simplified pattern and vivid color, he found a kindred spirit in Matisse. “Rue de Seine,” a 1972 etching of a corner of a room with French windows overlooking the street, particularly recalls the French master’s interest in contrasting indoor and outdoor space.

From the early ‘60s, when Hockney first visited Los Angeles--where he now lives--the city was his spiritual home. The relaxed, outdoor lifestyle brought out his coloristic and pattern-conscious affinities with Matisse, who enjoyed balmy climes in the south of France and who twice sojourned in Morocco. In prints like “Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and a Blue Wash,” Hockney renders the effects of light on water as a spacey collision of short wiggly lines with a distorted grid.

Flowing sketches of Celia, an English friend, making herself comfortable in domestic settings, hold distant memories of Matisse’s relaxed female sitters. A portrait of an aloof Henry Geldzahler (“Henry at Table”) also seems related to Hockney’s longstanding interest in the hieratic poses of ancient Egyptian art. Seen in profile, the portly art world figure seems to be having a te^te-a-te^te with a lone, spindly potted plant.

Hockney let his glib side get the upper hand in a 1985 homage to Cubism, “Two Pembroke Studio Chairs,” an interior neatly fractured into striped shards and deconstructed chairs. But his poster for “Parade,” a 1981 production of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, offers a hint of the witty work he has produced for the theater by rummaging through the grab bag of art history.

Heralding a trio of French 20th-Century works--including the 1917 ballet “Parade,” famous for its Cubist decor and costumes by Picasso--this vivid poster shows Harlequin, the traditional commedia dell’arte figure and a familiar subject of Picasso’s early work, doing a handstand on a patterned rug (a typically homey Hockney touch).

The stage is stocked with geometric props (including a pink striped pyramid a la Frank Stella) as well as the tricolor ladder from Picasso’s original stage design. With typical elan, Hockney belatedly inserted a stack of books to make the piece conform to standard broadsheet proportions.

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Although Richard Diebenkorn, who died two years ago, shared a love of sun-washed color and California landscape, he was a very different sort of artist, laboring for months over works before he would let them leave the studio.

Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, he grew up in San Francisco and studied art there. Matisse, whose work Diebenkorn saw at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., during his Marine Corps service in the ‘40s, probably was as key an influence as that of his San Francisco and New York contemporaries.

The French artist’s willingness to let the viewer see the trial-and-error process of painting in finished works and his use of line prove useful to the younger artist for decades to come.

Diebenkorn’s etching of a seated woman, from 1965, is one of many such pensive, intimate images he drew and painted between the mid-’50s and mid-’60s, after he abandoned an abstract style based on aerial landscape views. The relationship between the position of the woman’s arm and the curved elements of the chair is typical of the artist’s manner of locking his lone figures into their environments, while their minds seem adrift in reverie.

Two years later, when he moved to Santa Monica and began teaching art at UCLA, Diebenkorn returned to abstraction. Although none of the prints in the show seems related to the “Ocean Park” abstractions of that period, the affinities between Diebenkorn-the-draftsman/printer and Diebenkorn-the-painter are clear.

His work is as much about lines--as boundaries, enclosures and framing devices--as they are about limpid color. The clarity and ease of his coloristic approach is evident only in some of the works here. But the serenely probing quality of line, whether it describes the contours of a familiar living room or the appealing cloverleaf shape of the club on a playing card, remains a constant.

* “Hockey & Diebenkorn: A Print Survey/Selections from the BankAmerica Corporation Art Collection” continues through Aug. 11 at the BankAmerica Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. Noon to 7 p.m. Mondays, noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. Admission: free. (714) 433-6000.