Early Diebenkorn, Late Monet in New York

Some of the best pleasures are saved for last. That's true of two New York gallery shows, one much heralded but the other little publicized.

The painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) is an unassuming master whose assimilation and reworking of the French and Italian traditions into something distinctively reflective of the American West makes him an important successor to Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe. Diebenkorn is best known for his late Ocean Park series, painted in southern California, that transports Matisse— particularly the Matisse of the years around World War I— to the West Coast. It's an hommage that isn't in the least imitative, but a meditation on and an extension of some of the greatest art of the 20th Century.

Diebenkorn's earlier work is only now beginning to receive sustained attention, and the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery's relatively small show of work from his peripatetic years between 1949 and 1955 is a welcome addition to this new focus.

Diebenkorn was studying in Illinois and New Mexico during these years, before he finally settled in Berkeley. As was his wont, he mostly attached place names and numbers to his work (Albuquerque #7; Berkeley #25) when he titled them at all; the exception in the present show is The Green Huntsman (1952), which gets pride of place on the gallery's far wall and is uncharacteristically horizontal rather than vertical in construction.

Abstraction on the verge of image

Diebenkorn is above all a colorist, with an exquisitely muted palette set off by bold accents and subtle but unexpected combinations. He was primarily an abstractionist, but one frequently on the verge of image, and through most of his career he produced representational work— domestic interiors, landscapes and appreciative but unsentimental female portraits, often in the nude. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he seems to have moved easily back and forth between abstraction and representation, or, perhaps more accurately, to have partaken of both.

The present show includes a handful of paintings, black-and-white pen drawings, and mixed media work on paper (these the most boldly colorful), all formally abstract but for a small, untitled gouache from the mid-1950s, which suggests without quite committing itself to depicting a landscape. Perhaps one should better call it a response than a depiction, in which sense the abstract oil paintings also clearly respond to the sere, muted colors of the desert Southwest. In Diebenkorn, the false opposition between abstraction and representation is discarded for the academic distinction it is, and the fluid interchange between the two constitutes a supple and suggestive new vocabulary of the eye.

Monet's power of imagination

The idea of transforming phenomenal reality through the power of the imagination is, of course, at the heart of the Romantic project, and there can't be a better demonstration of its capacity than the late paintings of Claude Monet, whose Giverny series (water lilies, the Japanese pond, the great rose arch) are on display at Gagosian's 21st Street gallery in the most comprehensive East Coast exhibit of this work in 30 years. The 26 paintings on display come chiefly from private collections and the Marmottan Museum in Paris, but also from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bayeler Foundation in Switzerland, the Honolulu Academy of the Arts, and the Kitakyushu museum in Japan: a wide haul.

(The Kitakyushu's choice was culturally interesting: a work with dangling, disembodied "vines" down either side that puts one in mind of the calligraphic scrollwork of traditional Japanese and Chinese silk painting.)

Monet had already done haystacks, cathedrals and the British houses of Parliament when, his traveling days done, he retired to Giverny to find all the world he needed in his garden. The earliest painting on display, from 1904, is surprisingly conventional, as if Monet were sizing up his new subject material in representational terms. He immediately begins to transform it, however, creating a floating world in which the pond becomes both the symbol and the instrument of the imagination, its reflective properties creating a fluid medium in which sky and water become a single, shifting element.

The lilies, with their thin pads, are a saturated earth-element, unstable islands and continents on the huge, sustaining surface of the pond and the depths its reflections suggest. Their flowers— white, yellow, above all red— suggest in turn the grace-note of sentient and ultimately imaginative life; in one painting, a red flower sits alone on the upper left corner of the canvas, a gypsy touch that brings to mind a flower worn carelessly amid tresses.

Changing with the light

The last of the exhibit's four rooms, containing Monet's works up to 1924, introduces the final element of transfiguration: fire. These concentrate on the Japanese pond and the bridge that crosses it, and, on the final wall, three images of the rose arch— recognizably the same subject, viewed indeed from almost the same angle, but each magnificently different.

In the famous Haystacks series 30 years earlier, Monet had demonstrated for us how the same object changes with the light, and how the most prosaic of country sights can be charged with meaning and mystery by scrupulous observation. In the three works called The Path Under the Rose Arches (and it is the path, the journey that is emphasized by the title), he is no longer interested in observation as such but in emotional transformation, a world set ablaze by the imagination, absorbed and re-emitted by the inner eye as transfigured glory.

It is the glory of the human to enrich the world through the imagination, to add its mite to natural splendor. With the devastation we are wreaking on this planet, the air and waterways we have fouled and the species we have driven to extinction, that mite may seem an expensive luxury and an insufficient excuse. But in a corner of downtown Manhattan, Claude Monet pleads the human case as well as anyone can.