KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
Rumblings in the art world have it that "installation art" is the thing to
watch: witness the top floor of the last Whitney Biennial and
Dislocations,
Robert Storr's debut as curator of contemporary art at the Museum of
Modern Art. Yet if last fall was an accurate ind·icator, we should be
paying more attention to painting than ever. Not all of last season's
painting exhibitions were noteworthy or even any good at all, but it
was clear that
painting
-
as opposed to video, signage, or random scat–
terings of urban detritus - is still profoundly engaging the attention of
serious artists and viewers. That's not a value judgement; it is simply a
statement of fact.
Two exhibitions by Richard Diebenkorn, a retrospective at
London's Whitechapel Gallery and a show of recent works on paper at
New York's Knoedler Gallery, in November, could serve as indicators of
the phenomenon, both here and elsewhere. (The Lon'l:ion show will
travel to Madrid and Frankfurt in 1992.) In London, Diebenkorn was
something of a revelation to both younger artists and those with longer
memories. Everyone kept urging me to see the show, and they were
right. I have vivid recollections of my first encounter with Diebenkorn's
bold, rock-solid figures , when he, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park burst
upon New York in the early sixties. Too often since then, we have seen
only Diebenkorn's abstract paintings - his stripped-down geometric
constructions, at once economical and very worked, of the seventies and
eighties. The best of these are elegant, intelligent, and light-filled in a
way that makes Diebenkorn's relation to California equivalent to
Matisse's to Nice, but they can also be dry and repetitious to the point
of being almost generic. Diebenkorn's drawing retrospective at MOMA a
few years ago helped to remind us of his range and his inventiveness, but
it was the abstract works on paper that seemed strongest to me, in that
context. Had the potency of those early figure paintings been
exaggerated by time? Not according to the Whitechapel show.
There, a remarkably fine selection of works allowed us to consider
Diebenkorn's familiar recent paintings alongside of both his pivotal figu–
rative canvases and his even earlier abstractions. The latter, from 1949 to
