Body of Work: Diebenkorn at the Corcoran

The Ocean Park series is the name of the body of work painted by Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993) during the last twenty-five years of his successful career.  An abstract expressionist, Diebenkorn lived in Southern California during this period and named his paintings by place and number alone.  Following the first major retrospective of the series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and then at the Orange County Museum of Art, the exhibit came to the East Coast at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for the summer of 2012.  Large oil canvases, smaller acrylics on paper, watercolors on flimsy trace, and even tiny paintings on cigar box lids, this show encompassed his full exploration of media as well as his thorough investigation of, in his words, color, form, space and line.

Diebenkorn’s work attracted my attention many years ago.  I remember paintings with chalky and smoldering color patches next to lines that frame and release simultaneously, and suggestions of picture-free landscape.  Diebenkorn’s larger paintings are bigger than a spectator making them fields to enter, and the smaller ones seem to be windows to peer through.  They are balanced without mirroring symmetry, centered without objects, frames or perspectival devices, and complete without being overly polished.  Nothing seemed rushed or accidental or over-wrought.  The art opened my sensibilities and retained my interest without insulting my emotions.

Those who create have their purposes and corresponding materials for execution.  Each project has unique pressures in the making and judgment in the finishing.  Over time, sometimes, an artist develops both vocabulary and methods that becomes a signature recognizable to others.   Those who follow this work see the flow of thought from one project to the next, and these developments and evolutions become clearer with exhibitions that gather a lot of work in one place for viewing.  Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire many, many times, but until the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit where a dozen of these paintings of the same subject were displayed in the same room, their visual connections were more imagined than perceived.  If before the paintings were only available sequentially, now they could be experienced in the sweep of the eye collecting impressions in layers.

Taking an idea to exhaustion gives it a chance to be fully realized.  The patience to work through one project, learn all you can, accept that it is the best you can do at that time, and then set it aside for the next commitment takes disciplined curiosity.  Seeing a collection of such work allows others to participate in this forward motion as well as to witness the artist’s honest reappraisal of past effort.  No one does this better than Diebenkorn whose play of tones for instance in blues, greens and grays, cut with fine black lines, scraped down and built up as repetitively as a Philip Glass piano solo, and in this he shows his hand, his eye, his arm’s reach, the concerns of his heart and his intellect’s questions; that is, his whole body in his work.