RD: Personal Hero

RD

My friend Joshua Baer writes about wine with more creativity than anyone I know. (His reviews appear monthly in Santa Fe’s THE Magazine, and all his columns can be found on One Bottle.) Last month he blended a review of 2012 Comte Abbatucci Rosé “Cuvée Faustine” with his admiration for the artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993.)

Our mutual admiration for Diebenkorn (who we affectionately refer to as just plain “Dick”, or RD) runs deep. Joshua’s father, the well respected California photographer Morley Baer, knew Diebenkorn and actually photographed some of his paintings for him. Joshua and I share vignettes about RD and his life like kids with trading cards.

In a tribute that appeared in the New Yorker right after RD’s death, Adam Gopnik wrote about the Diebenkorn legacy in words that still feel resonant twenty years later. Yes, RD’s Ocean Park #48 sold for $13,250,000 at a Christie’s auction two years ago. But during his life, RD was pretty much dismissed by the East coast art cartel. When I arrived in Manhattan in the early 70s, few of the artists with whom I became friends even knew who he was. Given the influence RD had had on my work as a young West Coast art student, I found this disregard unsettling.

In his 1993 article, Gopnik references several of the RD obituaries that had just appeared. In one RD was described as a “poet of sunny spaciousness.”

The obituaries were typical of the slightly backhanded compliments that Diebenkorn had been getting for most of his career. Americans don’t want their painters to be affectionately regarded—we mostly like them tetchy and transcendental—and “sunny spaciousness” sounds more like something we ask of an apartment than of an abstract master. Even “lyrical painter” is one of those winking epithets—like “scrappy infielder,” hardworking comedian,” or “sensitive art critic”—which are really code for “not so hot.”

As one art critic had previously framed his take on RD, “Kenneth Noland is a shark; Diebenkorn is a little goldfish.”

Presaging by 20 years the eventual rewrite of the West Coast’s influence on American art brought about by the 200+ venue mega-exhibit, Pacific Standard Time, Gopnik makes the case that Diebenkorn was in fact a key figure in that transformation of California from “provincial backwater to an artmaking capital equal to New York.” But he also acknowledges how slow others were to see that influence clearly:

His best paintings, the “Ocean Park” series were begun in the late sixties, when the ideological thuggery that has dominated New York art criticism ever since was just coming into being. Mannerism produces ideologues the way civil wards produce refugees: an art in which everything is held in quotation marks demands one gang of commentators to untangle its allusions and another gang of commentators to mock the first. Diebenkorn was patronized, or just ignored, by the ideological thugs of the left and encumbered with praise by the ideological thugs on the right…They admired his work for its absences, for all that it didn’t include (explicit political or ironic content, the more obvious kinds of pop imagery), and thereby left an impression, which may be hard to erase, of Diebenkorn as a Malibu Matisse.

Gopnik speaks to the influence of Matisse on RD’s work—which is certainly valid—but he shifts gears and makes the case that Diebenkorn is actually much more in the tradition of Cézanne:

Cézanne, unique among the masters, was utterly square. Diebenkorn, the perfect representative of a culture without irony, was square, too, but he managed to be square without being corny, which is a nice way of remaining classic. This unbending classical sincerity—a Cézannist quality—-radiated from the man, and it was a trait that his friends most often admired and recalled.

In spite of the current proclivity to report on art that feasts on irony morning, noon and night, there are many of us who are more drawn to that sphere of “unbending classical sincerity.” And if anyone can make being square the coolest compliment ever, it would be RD.

Call me square, PLEASE.

Richard Diebenkorn in front of Ocean Park #59, Ashland and Main studio, Santa Monica, 1972 (Photo: Gilbert Lloyd Courtesy: Orange County Museum of Art)

More posts on Slow Muse about RD:

The Shape-Making Impulse

State of Paint

This Flashing Present

Diebenkorn’s Fields of Silence

Pacific Standard Time: Proof at the Norton Simon Museum

Pacific Standard Time: Begin the Rewrite

The Other Coast, Reconsidered

Left Coast Report