Richard Diebenkorn monotypes in N.Y.

An American Matisse:
Diebenkorn monotypes in New York

ROBERT ZALLER

A small, fine show, not to be missed if you’re in New York in the next few weeks, is “Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park Monotypes and Drawings,” at Fifth Avenue’s Greenberg Van Doren Gallery. Diebenkorn (1922-1993) had one of the most important careers in American art in the second half of the 20th Century, and he’d be as well known as, say, Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg if he’d had the good sense to spend it on the East Coast. Diebenkorn was a determined Westerner, though: born in Portland, educated in California and New Mexico, and resident in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unless you are Georgia O’Keeffe (who enjoyed very good New York connections), there’s a price to be paid for such willfulness, and that price is usually obscurity or dismissal. Diebenkorn did pay it for a long time, and his belated recognition—beginning with a posthumous Whitney Museum show in 1998— hasn’t yet erased decades of neglect.

Diebenkorn was originally connected to the San Francisco school that emerged after World War II, but his best-known work, the Ocean Park series, was done in the Santa Monica neighborhood of that name, where he lived from 1966 to 1986. Executed in a great variety of media, including the monotypes on display at Greenberg Van Doren, they typically reference the creative act itself, their linearized, grid-like structures often suggesting the scaffolding of a canvas. Within these compositional structures, endlessly varied despite the overall framework, Diebenkorn deployed a rich and subtle palette, derived from Matisse but perpetually novel and surprising in its effects.

An ascetic is lurking

To call Diebenkorn an American Matisse would, in fact, not be far off the mark, and not too heavy a burden for his work to bear. Not merely in his open, Mediterranean colors (and California is, of course, our Mediterranean), but in his purity and restraint of line, his sensibility is Matissean, a kind of sensuality of the rational. As with Matisse too, however, an ascetic is always lurking on the premises, and the subtle tension among these elements is what makes for the excitement of the result.

Monotypes make up all but a handful of the 42 works on display. A monotype is, as the term suggests, a one-of-a-kind. The design is drawn or painted on a metal or Plexiglas surface, and the impression is pulled off it onto a sheet of paper by a press. Unlike incised impressions that can be inked repeatedly as in other forms of printmaking, the design is usually destroyed in being transferred, although occasionally a second or “ghost” impression can be made. The design itself is difficult to execute and fix on a nonabsorbent surface, and the pull must be done with great care.

Following its invention by a 17th-Century Italian, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, the monotype was largely ignored as a form until Degas revived it in the 19th Century. Jasper Johns is another expert practitioner. Although monotypes are still mainly for the connoisseur, the form is increasingly popular.

Subtle contrasts of light and dark

Most of the monotypes here are monochromatic, although touches of color occasionally appear, and some are fully colored. This is Diebenkorn the linearist, reliant for the most part on line (strong V shapes predominating) with subtle contrasts of light and dark, and a graininess of texture that reflects the opacity of the medium. The graininess works just as well with color— as in the splendid RD2603 (none of the works have titles), with its solemn blue panels— and Diebenkorn liked the effect well enough to incorporate it deliberately in some of the drawings, done in gouache.

Apart from everything else, these are works of great technical mastery by an artist who explored virtually every possibility of print and graphic art, and who left a body of iconography as distinctive and distinguished as any in our time.