110
PARTISAN REVIEW
about 1954, were strangely anonymous and dated, more suggestive of
disguised landscape than real formal exploration. In the mid-fifties, the
long shadow of de Kooning appears to have fallen on Diebenkorn in
Berkeley. The young painter began then to build his pictures of overlap–
ping soft-edged planes, reminiscent of de Kooning's abstractions of the
1940s, and, at the same time, to allow himself more overt reference to
actuality; perhaps de Kooning's own "reversion"
to
figuration , the
Women of the 1950s, gave Diebenkorn permission to pursue his own
inclinations. From 1955 on, Diebenkorn's pictures have more energy and
personality than anything that preceded them, a fusion of vigorous
"pure" painting and free but convincing illusionism . His seated figures,
domestic interiors, and landscapes of the late fifties and early sixties still
seem remarkably fresh , energetic, and audacious. Their generous images
are built of robust, juicy brush strokes that effortlessly carve out distances
or lay in limbs, furniture, trees, and domestic utensils, all with the same
assurance. Diebenkorn's paintings of this period rationalize the looseness
and brushiness of "wet into wet" Abstract Expressionism - de Kooning,
as opposed to Pollock or Rothko - using the angst-ridden gestures of
New York abstraction to describe a sun-dappled, idyllic world.
Somehow, it works.
In contrast to these brash early works, the later pictures in the
Whitechapel exhibition - the Ocean Park series, from the late sixties
through 1985 - seemed slightly cautious, a little aestheticized. Their
compositions are trued and faired, their color narrowed to a hazy
beach front palette of whitened blues, blued whites, and the occasional
blast of ultramarine. They are solemn, frontal pictures; being in a room
full of Ocean Park paintings is like standing in a complex of classical
temples . The Whitechapc!'s excellent selection of the abstract works
stressed their individuality and sensuality, so that Diebenkorn's paintings
of the seventies and eighties never looked better to me, but at the same
time, they seemed to lack the spiritedness, the rawboned
darillg
of the
earlier works. The same was true of the recent works on paper in the
Knoedler exhibition, many of which seemed rather labored and overly
fussed over. It's also true that, generally, they explored a wider territory
than has been evident in the past few years, with a new looseness of
structure, a new release from the implied vertical-horizontal grid of so
many of the abstract pictures that seems to hark back to earlier strategies.
These changes may result from Diebenkorn's recently having moved away
from Ocean Park, or they may have been provoked by his reviewing his
own past during the preparation of the retrospective .
What is clear is that Diebenkorn has explored the same, absolutely
fundamental issue from the earliest works in the Whitechapel show to
the most recent collage at Knoedler: how to reconcile a three-dimen-
