GOD IS IN THE VECTORS

By ROBERT HUGHES

Foot for square foot, the current retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's paintings at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art offers more aesthetic pleasure than any other show--at least of contemporary art--in town. Which isn't to say the Whitney has done the subject full justice. Its heart being where it is, the museum needed lots and lots of space to present a mass of trivia and threadbare junk from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa., pointlessly documenting the pallid maestro's effect on advertising and fashion, under the title "The Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion." So the Whitney's out-of-house curator, Jane Livingston, found the space for Diebenkorn whittled down to one floor and a small entry gallery of the museum, which is nothing like enough for a just overview of the man's pictorial achievement.

Except for an excellent show of his drawings curated by John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, never had a fair deal from New York museums. The city's cultural establishment viewed him as, well, a California artist--a bit of an outsider, a bit marginal, insufficiently difficult or radical, too easy on the eye, whatever. Diebenkorn, one of the most flintily self-critical artists who ever lived in America, took this in his stride, and his oeuvre (closed, alas, too early) handily answers his detractors. Nobody who cares about painting as an art--as distinct from propaganda, complaint or "cutting edge" ephemera--could be indifferent to Diebenkorn's work or to the long, intense and fascinating dialogue with the modernist past it embodies.

Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, Diebenkorn was raised in San Francisco and got his first art education there--a process interrupted by his enlistment in the Marine Corps. This, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since he was posted to Quantico, Va., and while there was able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist pantheon) for the rest of his working life, this particular Matisse, with its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled and inspired him: "I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet the surface is right there...right up front."

Discharged from the military in 1945, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts. Over the next several years, he moved between the East and West coasts. His work from the late '40s to the early '50s was essentially abstract, though with strong overtones of landscape space and color. A considerable influence of Willem de Kooning bore on it. De Kooning, Diebenkorn felt, "had it all, could outpaint anybody, at least until the mid-'60s, when he began to lose it." But Diebenkorn's friendship with the Bay Area painter David Park, who bravely refused to accept the reigning dictum in the American avant-garde that radicalism had to mean abstraction, pointed him still closer toward the figurative.

By 1957, Diebenkorn's figurative phase was well and truly under way, all its parts integrated, in landscape, figure painting and still life. But it's necessary to realize, and the show makes this quite clear, that for all his shifts between degrees of abstraction and figuration, Diebenkorn remained essentially the same artist; he wasn't someone trying on different suits to see which ones fit.

In hindsight one can see the components of his culminating achievement, the Ocean Park series, forming in a small, early landscape like Seawall, 1957. First, the clear marine light that seems to bathe all the forms, whether sharply cut (the tawny beach and wedges of black shadow on the left) or vaguer (the tract of scribbled green grass on the right). Second, Diebenkorn's decisiveness about tonal structure and the way sharp contrast can be used both to hollow out the space of the painting and to create a firm, flat pattern. And third, a breezy lyricism of feeling that was especially Diebenkorn's, an exhilaration at the material fullness of the world, translated into terms of pigment.

Edward Hopper was one of Diebenkorn's inner jury of admired masters--no other American painter except de Kooning influenced him as much. What he liked in Hopper, Diebenkorn once laconically said, was "the diagonals." Not the mood: you can't extract a Hopperish melancholy from Woman in a Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be thinking doesn't count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence of vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky, the tabletop rushing away to the right at a shallow angle, the triangle of the arm propping the head, and the woman's left hand drooping over the upper arm, its slack spiky fingers echoed in the red-and-blue stripes of a cloth draped over the chair arm. All these angles, beautifully integrated, give the image an architecture that solidifies the passing moment, a firmness to which Hopper's diagonals pointed the way.

This virile structure enabled Diebenkorn to explore all manner of nuances, shifts of tone, transparencies and textural quirks in the areas of color it defined. It let the picture bear provisional or openly corrected passages, without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle. Structure was the key, not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly more than visual nouns--a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies in it; a knife in another glass, bent by refraction--rendered with the immediacy and verve one associates with Manet's asparagus and peonies.

The precondition of his structure, in turn, was drawing. Diebenkorn drew incessantly. It wasn't only that he belonged to the last generation of American artists to be raised in a culture of drawing. He loved the act. Drawing was sifting the world's disorder. It was making sense of random agglomerations of things, unconscious postures of the body. (In all his drawings and paintings of his wife Phyllis, you only rarely get the sense that she was actually posing.) Every painter has favorite shapes and gestures, which, unless they encounter some resistance, can turn into mannerisms. Diebenkorn's style certainly grew some mannerisms, but drawing--the continuous friction against obdurate motifs--prevented them from getting ingrown, turning into tics.

The climax of Diebenkorn's work was, by general consent, the Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967. Ocean Park is part of Santa Monica, the beachside suburb of Los Angeles where he had his studio. From its high crystalline light, its big calm planes of sea and sky, its cuts and interlacings of highway divider and curb and gable and yellow sand, Diebenkorn produced a marvelous synthesis that, though prolonged through more than 140 large canvases, had very few weak moments.

In the Ocean Parks, with their pentimenti and layering left exposed to view, one sees the summation of Diebenkorn's admiration for Matisse's way of leaving the picture with the traces of its own making. This reworking leaves an impression of curiosity, not indecision. The paintings are broadly brushed and then "tuned" by passages of fine, but not fidgety, detail. The color, glazed or discreetly scumbled, is luminous--now diffuse like sea fog, now hard and bright as direct sun. The Ocean Parks radiate an Apollonian calm, an uncoercive authority. They are the creations of a man with a fully integrated temperament, candid but not showy. There is nothing else quite like them in modern painting, in America or the world.