Edition: U.S. / Global

A Life Outside

By Michael Kimmelman;
Published: September 13, 1992

The house of the painter Richard Diebenkorn, in the northern California town of Healdsburg, sits along a narrow, winding road that hugs the Russian River, slices through woods and spills into the lush plain of the Alexander Valley. It is a simple two-story white box built in the 1880's and ornamented only with a crown of iron tracery. Directly in front of the house is one of the area's many vineyards, which in the spring becomes shot through with brilliant yellow mustard plants.

At 70 years old, Diebenkorn is a shy, bespectacled figure, prone to corduroys and button-down shirts, who in his professorial and studiously unbohemian way seems the antithesis of the cliche of the slick SoHo artist-enterpreneur. He likes to speak of the "tension beneath calm" in his work, but he could also be describing himself. Having spent almost his whole life in California, he has inevitably been viewed as an outsider by the New York art world, toward which he, in turn, bears a not always hidden aversion. He once briefly contemplated life there, but he now insists that the distance from Manhattan has been healthy for his career.

"If you're there," he says, "you get all involved in the moment, in the issues that are always present but don't really mean all that much. I could imagine myself back there in the late 50's and 60's and hearing friends say, 'This is where it is,' and feeling the pressure of that. So I'm glad I couldn't go down to the Cedar Tavern," the Greenwich Village bar famous as a haunt of the Abstract Expressionists, "where I would be reassured and get drunk or slap someone else on the back. I like having had to rely on my own resources, although it seemed pretty desolate occasionally."

Diebenkorn can recall, almost verbatim, the slights of a few critics who over the years took his independence of New York art trends to be proof of provinciality. When Abstract Expressionism was ascendant in New York in the 1950's, Diebenkorn switched from abstraction to figuration. When Pop Art helped to make figuration fashion able again in the 60's, he switched back to abstraction. Diebenkorn zigged when New York zagged. Although for many years he taught painting, and attracted many imitators, he has cultivated no "school" of followers, no circle around him ("I've always had this fear of an entourage," he says). He is a private man who makes a very private brand of art, which happens to be some of the most serious and seductive abstract painting of the postwar period in America.

Lately, his health has gone up and down, but in recent months Diebenkorn was so ill that several times his friends feared he might die. Two rounds of open-heart surgery, two collapsed vertebrae, pneumonia and a bout of radiation therapy after doctors detected a spot on an X-ray all hobbled him and rendered it sometimes difficult for him to breathe.

Yet even before these maladies, he was inclined to hunch his large frame to make himself a less imposing presence. He speaks in a halting, almost apologetic manner, forever correcting what he just said, or wincing at what he perceives as the imprecision of his own, or your, remark. He'll pause for a good while before answering a question. Sometimes he will correct or alter even a minor statement he made a day or more before, having silently ruminated about it during the interim. He somehow exudes at the same time extreme self-doubt and tremendous self-confidence. He seems to revel in the process of arriving at a solution no less than in the solution itself.

This is very much the spirit in which Diebenkorn paints. He has produced hundreds of abstractions during the last quarter of a century, most of them part of his Ocean Park series, named after the section of Santa Monica where he kept a studio from 1966 until he moved north of San Francisco to Healdsburg in 1988. Each of these abstractions discloses the history of its making: the works are composed of second thoughts, pentimenti, erasures and emendations, which at their best combine to form images of remarkable elegance and poise. The strength, and also the curiosity, of the work lies in this contradiction -- that indecision, conflict and ad hoc tinkering could become the stuff of such deeply lyric art.

Diebenkorn refers often to Cezanne, who achieved what the art historian Meyer Schapiro once aptly called "a serenely ordered whole," only after "a long and painful struggle with himself." The pervasive blues of Cezanne's scenes of Montagne Sainte-Victoire dominate Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series. Like Cezanne's landscapes, Diebenkorn's abstractions have the qualities of balance, control, absolute honesty, painstaking piece-by-piece construction and riveting detail. Matisse, because of the suavity of his art, is the painter most often cited as Diebenkorn's principal inspiration, but Cezanne remains at least as important.

So it is no wonder that on a late afternoon in the early spring Diebenkorn should stand outside his house, pointing across the vineyard to a nearby mountain obscured by clouds, and refer to it wryly as "my Montagne Sainte-Victoire." This idyllic spot in Northern California may be the closest American approximation of Cezanne's native Provence.