Art: EDGING AWAY FROM ABSTRACTION

BY tradition, artists slog painfully through a conventional academic training, then belligerently break the rules to arrive at a more expressive, personal style. This week Manhattan’s Poindexter Gallery shows the work of a painter who reversed the procedure. Brought up in the new academy of abstraction, where anything goes, California’s Richard Diebenkorn painstakingly traced his steps back from abstraction through nature to man as art’s subject.

Rangy ex-Marine Diebenkorn. 35, is a Berkeley painter whose style was formed by the influence of Abstractionists Clyfford Still, David Park and Mark Rothko at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts. Hardly pausing for a representational phase, Diebenkorn plunged into landscapes that became increasingly poetic and abstract. At 26 he rated a one man show at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor, was soon recognized as one of the West Coast’s top abstract painters. But in November 1955 Diebenkorn abruptly decided that in abstraction he had come to the end of the road.

“I was encumbered with style and too concerned with style,” he says. “There were a good many things I wanted to say—to talk about—that a more strict style prevented. My painting was too inbred. Representation was a challenge I hadn’t had before.”

What Diebenkorn soon discovered was that “representation represents a fantastic clutter of possibilities filled with booby traps and corn fields”—i.e., the trite and sentimental. But his abstract period served him well in his new endeavor, providing an overall pattern and a primary color palette. His more realistic work can thus be easily appreciated by abstract painters who still find in it the “big, severe orientation of shape” they have long admired in his abstractions. The main difference is in mood. His abstractions recalled sunlit, freshly green California hills, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific; his representations introduce man as a somber, lonely figure, and hark back to an early admiration for such realist painters as Edward Hopper (TIME, Dec. 24, 1956).

The significance of Diebenkorn’s recent work* is that it points a way for other younger painters to combine the surface richness and excitement discovered through abstraction with a recognizable subject matter. As Diebenkorn sees the problem: “Bad non-representational painting isn’t very bad. But representational painting can be so damned bad and so terrible that, perhaps, it can be that much better.” His past three years’ work, on view in Manhattan, is evidently “that much better.” In the first three days alone, 20 of his 26 oils were sold at prices from $300 to $1,800.

* Some of his paintings will be included in the exhibit of American painters under 45 to be held in the U.S. Pavilion at next month’s Brus sels World’s Fair.