Lot Essay
Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series ranks among the greatest achievements of American art in the post-war era. Through their combination of abstraction and representation, geometry and gesture, tradition and independence, the works obtain a level of sublimity and high seriousness almost unique in American painting of the last thirty years. Ocean Park No. 9 from 1968 is one of the earliest works of the series and exemplifies the characteristic qualities of the group.
The genesis of the Ocean Park series is well documented. Throughout his career, Diebenkorn was fascinated by the tension between abstraction and representation. Initially he made figurative and landscape pictures in a manner deeply influenced by the spare geometry of Edward Hopper; but in the late 1940s, he entered a phase of pure abstraction, painting large, dynamic and richly colorful canvases (see lot 20). In 1956, however, he reverted to a more naturalistic mode, and for the next ten years, he made small exquisite still-lifes and large decorative landscapes and figurative pictures. Over and over again in the works of this period Diebenkorn tested the balance between geometrical order and naturalistic depiction. These canvases were the most important, distinctive and magisterial canvases he had made up to that point in his career. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s, he had grown dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on his work by the exigencies of naturalism. As Diebenkorn later explained:
I wanted to get away from having to follow all the obligations, so to speak, that were carried by a given subject... In brief, I suppose I just wanted more freedom. (Quoted in J. Livingston, op. cit., p. 65)
He began searching for a new mode.
The work of Henri Matisse was the primary influence on Diebenkorn in this search. Diebenkorn visited Russia in 1964 and was deeply impressed by the works by Matisse that he saw in Leningrad, especially Harmonie rouge (fig. 1), Porte de la casbah (The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and Sur la terrasse (The Pushkin Museum, Moscow; fig. 1). Diebenkorn's reaction was profound, and in 1965 he painted Recollection of a Visit to Leningrad (fig. 2) in response. This picture, with its floral arabesques, and its flat rectilinear sections of rich and deeply saturated color, is a loving hommage to Matisse. Moreover, it clearly foreshadows the developments of the Ocean Park series. This is most explicit in the architectonic structure of the picture's surface. The grid of verticals and horizontals at the left and the interlocking triangles at the right would reappear, in variation, throughout the Ocean Park pictures, including the present work. Diebenkorn's investigation of a Matissean mode was further stimulated by his visit to an exhibition of the artist's paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. Two pictures, Une vue de Notre-Dame (fig. 3) and Porte fentre Collioure (Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou) were especially influential for Diebenkorn. The impact of these works on the Ocean Park series is unmistakable.
In the fall of 1966, Diebenkorn moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles in order to teach at UCLA. On several occasions earlier in his career, Diebenkorn had changed his style when he changed cities, and the pictorial developments which accompanied the move of this year were to be the most momentous of his life. He rented a studio in the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica and by 1967 he had begun work on the Ocean Park series. These works constituted a radical departure for the artist in a number of ways. By contrast with his earlier abstract works, the Ocean Park canvases are more austere and rectilinear in structure. As Jack Flam has observed:
The rectilinear forms constantly refer to the edges of the rectangle of the canvas itself and the geometry of their format is intensified by Diebenkorn's use of the straight edge to draw the lines, a practice that he has referred to as having been forbidden in his earlier paintings. (J. Flam, Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park, New York, 1992, p. 22)
At the same time, in comparison with his earlier abstract pictures, the surfaces are looser, and less densely painted; but they are, nevertheless, energized by the evident brushwork and the intentional inclusion of many pentimenti. Diebenkorn once wrote that he sought to create "a feeling of strength in reserve--tension beneath the calm" (quoted in ibid., p. 24). The combination of linear structure and painterly surface has exactly this effect.
Although the pictures of the Ocean Park series are not representational landscapes in any traditional sense, many critics believe they were directly inspired by the character of the light on the California coast. Arthur Danto, for example, has said that these works are:
dense with coastal allusions to sky, ocean, seaside and sun, tawny hills, bleached architecture, sharp shadows and angular illuminations, green expanses and glimpsed distant blues, and possibly haunted by the erasure of human presences. (A. Danto, "Paint-ing in Ocean Park," Times Literary Supplement, 13-19 May 1988, p. 537)
And Robert Hughes has written:
[These] works may be the most refined images of the abstract bones of landscape...done by an American artist of his generation. Pale-blue Pacific air, cuts and slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or thruway--these images of the California coast have found their way into his works, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the early twentieth century, are Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian... There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline--mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the ticky-tack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu--that is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature, whether they suggest actual landscape or not. (R. Hughes, "Richard Diebenkorn," Nothing if Not Critical, New York, 1990, p. 278)
Indeed, Hughes has stated, "Taken together...the Ocean Park series are surely one of the most distinguished meditations on landscape in painting since Monet's waterlilies" (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, London, 1991, p. 159). Without question, Ocean Park No. 9 resonates with a kind of poetical allusiveness traditionally associated with the lyrical pleasures of landscape painting.
Diebenkorn's status as a key figure in twentieth century American art is secured by the grandeur and contemplative beauty of the Ocean Park series. Hughes once wrote:
Diebenkorn is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure... In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words 'high seriousness' might have been invented. The Ocean Parks, the monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967... are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the last thirty years. (Quoted in J. Livingston, op.cit., p. 73)
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Harmonie rouge, 1908
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
(fig. 2) Richard Diebenkorn, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965
Private collection
(fig. 3) Henri Matisse, Une vue de Notre Dame, 1914
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The genesis of the Ocean Park series is well documented. Throughout his career, Diebenkorn was fascinated by the tension between abstraction and representation. Initially he made figurative and landscape pictures in a manner deeply influenced by the spare geometry of Edward Hopper; but in the late 1940s, he entered a phase of pure abstraction, painting large, dynamic and richly colorful canvases (see lot 20). In 1956, however, he reverted to a more naturalistic mode, and for the next ten years, he made small exquisite still-lifes and large decorative landscapes and figurative pictures. Over and over again in the works of this period Diebenkorn tested the balance between geometrical order and naturalistic depiction. These canvases were the most important, distinctive and magisterial canvases he had made up to that point in his career. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s, he had grown dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on his work by the exigencies of naturalism. As Diebenkorn later explained:
I wanted to get away from having to follow all the obligations, so to speak, that were carried by a given subject... In brief, I suppose I just wanted more freedom. (Quoted in J. Livingston, op. cit., p. 65)
He began searching for a new mode.
The work of Henri Matisse was the primary influence on Diebenkorn in this search. Diebenkorn visited Russia in 1964 and was deeply impressed by the works by Matisse that he saw in Leningrad, especially Harmonie rouge (fig. 1), Porte de la casbah (The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and Sur la terrasse (The Pushkin Museum, Moscow; fig. 1). Diebenkorn's reaction was profound, and in 1965 he painted Recollection of a Visit to Leningrad (fig. 2) in response. This picture, with its floral arabesques, and its flat rectilinear sections of rich and deeply saturated color, is a loving hommage to Matisse. Moreover, it clearly foreshadows the developments of the Ocean Park series. This is most explicit in the architectonic structure of the picture's surface. The grid of verticals and horizontals at the left and the interlocking triangles at the right would reappear, in variation, throughout the Ocean Park pictures, including the present work. Diebenkorn's investigation of a Matissean mode was further stimulated by his visit to an exhibition of the artist's paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. Two pictures, Une vue de Notre-Dame (fig. 3) and Porte fentre Collioure (Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou) were especially influential for Diebenkorn. The impact of these works on the Ocean Park series is unmistakable.
In the fall of 1966, Diebenkorn moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles in order to teach at UCLA. On several occasions earlier in his career, Diebenkorn had changed his style when he changed cities, and the pictorial developments which accompanied the move of this year were to be the most momentous of his life. He rented a studio in the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica and by 1967 he had begun work on the Ocean Park series. These works constituted a radical departure for the artist in a number of ways. By contrast with his earlier abstract works, the Ocean Park canvases are more austere and rectilinear in structure. As Jack Flam has observed:
The rectilinear forms constantly refer to the edges of the rectangle of the canvas itself and the geometry of their format is intensified by Diebenkorn's use of the straight edge to draw the lines, a practice that he has referred to as having been forbidden in his earlier paintings. (J. Flam, Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park, New York, 1992, p. 22)
At the same time, in comparison with his earlier abstract pictures, the surfaces are looser, and less densely painted; but they are, nevertheless, energized by the evident brushwork and the intentional inclusion of many pentimenti. Diebenkorn once wrote that he sought to create "a feeling of strength in reserve--tension beneath the calm" (quoted in ibid., p. 24). The combination of linear structure and painterly surface has exactly this effect.
Although the pictures of the Ocean Park series are not representational landscapes in any traditional sense, many critics believe they were directly inspired by the character of the light on the California coast. Arthur Danto, for example, has said that these works are:
dense with coastal allusions to sky, ocean, seaside and sun, tawny hills, bleached architecture, sharp shadows and angular illuminations, green expanses and glimpsed distant blues, and possibly haunted by the erasure of human presences. (A. Danto, "Paint-ing in Ocean Park," Times Literary Supplement, 13-19 May 1988, p. 537)
And Robert Hughes has written:
[These] works may be the most refined images of the abstract bones of landscape...done by an American artist of his generation. Pale-blue Pacific air, cuts and slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or thruway--these images of the California coast have found their way into his works, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the early twentieth century, are Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian... There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline--mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the ticky-tack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu--that is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature, whether they suggest actual landscape or not. (R. Hughes, "Richard Diebenkorn," Nothing if Not Critical, New York, 1990, p. 278)
Indeed, Hughes has stated, "Taken together...the Ocean Park series are surely one of the most distinguished meditations on landscape in painting since Monet's waterlilies" (R. Hughes, The Shock of the New, London, 1991, p. 159). Without question, Ocean Park No. 9 resonates with a kind of poetical allusiveness traditionally associated with the lyrical pleasures of landscape painting.
Diebenkorn's status as a key figure in twentieth century American art is secured by the grandeur and contemplative beauty of the Ocean Park series. Hughes once wrote:
Diebenkorn is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure... In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words 'high seriousness' might have been invented. The Ocean Parks, the monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967... are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the last thirty years. (Quoted in J. Livingston, op.cit., p. 73)
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Harmonie rouge, 1908
The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
(fig. 2) Richard Diebenkorn, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965
Private collection
(fig. 3) Henri Matisse, Une vue de Notre Dame, 1914
The Museum of Modern Art, New York