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RICHARD DIEBENKORN
(1922-1993)
Ocean Park No. 67
signed with initials and dated 73; signed, titled and dated 1973 on the reverse
oil on canvas
100 by 81in. 254 by 205.7cm.
PROVENANCE
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Marron, New York
Steve Martin, Los Angeles
C & M Arts, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above
EXHIBITED
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd; Zurich, Marlborough Galerie, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, Recent Work, December 1973-March 1974, cat. no. 15, p. 51, illustrated in color
Venice, XXXVIIIth Venice Biennial, United States Pavilion, Richard Diebenkorn, July-October 1978, cat. no. 7, p. 48, illustrated in color
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park Paintings, November-December 1992, p. 54, illustrated in color
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum; Washington D.C., The Phillips Collection; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, October 1997-January 1999, cat. no. 163, p. 213, illustrated in color
Richard Diebenkorn began his famous series of Ocean Park canvases in 1967. The monumental, airy, almost geometric abstractions represented the second major shift in Diebenkorn's work, as they followed twelve years of boldly considered figuration and an early career of gestural abstraction. The Ocean Park works were initially inspired by the works of Matisse, paintings which sought to occupy
the space between figuration and abstraction with a lyrical ease. It was just such a space which Diebenkorn would approach. Unbeholden to artistic orthodoxy of any shape, and seemingly unconcerned with art critics of any stripe, Diebenkorn left a legacy as a rugged individualist, an iconoclast, an alternative to the dominant stream of art in his time.
Ocean Park, No. 67 is a luminous example of the series. Indeed, the painting's "light" has been the subject of much discussion. It has often been related to Diebenkorn's sensitivity for his surroundings, and the subtle quality of the sunlight near Santa Monica in California. The chromatic juxtapositions in Ocean Park, No. 67, with rich yellows and marigolds alongside icy blues, solid lavender and a diaphanous green easily bring to mind such associations of place - Tuscany, perhaps, or Spain, and California as well.
And yet such associations fall short for lack of close looking. Diebenkorn's colors are not illustrative so much as constructive. Because of their delicate transparency, the colors are seen more in terms of process than result. Diebenkorn's thin glazes of color refuse to cover and hide what lies beneath; instead each layer modifies and gently alters the colors which remain veiled behind. Thus, in Ocean Park, No. 67 a diagonal band of white is made to hover in a milky translucence above a vertical band of medium blue, while the golden yellow ground provides a visible foundation for each. Even within the yellow field which covers most of the painting's surface, multiple layers produce myriad hues, each with subtly different tone, saturation and luminance: a pastel yellow, a shadowy ochre, a stucco color, each the product of layered complexity.
Jane Livingston describes the effect this way: "One of the most important hallmarks of the Ocean Park paintings, evident from the very beginning, is that each one creates its own, self-contained chromatic universe, and each functions within that universe in a structurally self-sufficient way. The sheer complexity of incident within each painting, to say nothing of their comparative serial complexity, is
unrivaled in the abstract painting of the era. It might well be argued that, in this sense, Mark Rothko takes a distant second place to Richard Diebenkorn." (Jane Livingston in The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997. p. 65)
It is Diebenkorn's restless attention to material process which undergirds the effect of the Ocean Park canvases, and No. 67 in particular. Like the planes and facets of color laid hesitatingly, one atop another, lines of charcoal and colored lines of paint are drawn and redrawn, nearly covered and then retraced. Diebenkorn shifts them as he constructs the composition, leaving ghost marks, pentimenti, to make the canvas a record of old ideas, of grand schemes hatched and forgotten, of hints of what might have been; and yet the final, last solution, the topmost layer, lays claim to a restful, seemingly inevitable solution. Diebenkorn takes pains to show this painting as a process of alternating decisiveness and recanting, all the while advanced through the tactile materiality of paint on canvas.
Thus, in Ocean Park, No. 67, Richard Diebenkorn joins seductive, intuitive coloring with the tactile materiality of process laid bare. The viewer, likewise, is made to balance between the inward-looking meditations of sheer visual perception and the out-going acceptance of the painting as a material object. Diebenkorn thus can be said to negotiate two streams of contemporary art, Mark Rothko's introspective canvases and Color Field painting on one side, Minimalism and the process of Conceptual Art on the other, by daring to extend the explorations of Matisse and Mondrian without apology.