Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Richard Diebenkorn
American; 20th-century
Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum
87%
Ocean Park #133. 1985. Oil on canvas
One of the rare black paintings in the Ocean Park series, this one vibrates with the usual intense interrelations between its elements. The eye is not so much invited as compelled to wander back and forth between the curlicues in the lower left and the narrow passages of color at the top right edges. Has there ever been a painter more aware of the potentials of line and space than Diebenkorn? Even in his portraits and landscapes he is preoccupied with the picture plane and not the three-dimensional space he is supposedly depicting. This is reinforced by the handling of the empty expanses between the white lines: the loose and smudgy quality of the brushwork asserts the fact that this is a painting, not a representation or even a geometry lesson. The way the black regions push and squeeze against their confining grid makes me wonder if the reason dark paintings are so rare in his oeuvre is that Diebenkorn was not certain he wanted to explore the implications of spaces dominating each other so fiercely. In general, his art is an art of equal, democratic relationships; this particular painting is not. (WC, 2025)