Ocean Park No. 38 at the Phillips

So on Saturday afternoon I found myself at the Phillips Collection, which had just installed a show of recent acquisitions that might as well have been subtitled, "While you're here, perhaps you can explain to us what in the name of Duncan Arthur Phillips three Elizabeth Murrays are doing here?!" when I bumped into an old friend, Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park No. 38.

I love the Ocean Park seris. As far as I'm concerned it's the apex of American abstract painting, a notch above Mark Rothko's color clouds and several notches above anything else. (Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, you're next.) Selecting my favorite Ocean Park painting seems mostly to be a function of which one I've seen most recently: FAMSF's, SFMOMA's, Hunk & Moo Anderson's (recently on view in San Jose, Calif.), MoMA's and of course, maybe the Phillips'.

One of the reasons these are such great paintings is that there are umpteen ways to approach them. What are those lines there for? Is there anything specific Diebenkorn has abstracted to get to this painting? To what is he referring with that diagonal or that color ? And as I find myself thinking about these things, I feel like I'm standing amidst the painting, that I've somehow entered the canvas.

The lines that most preoccupied me on Saturday were the diagonals that run up through the center of the painting. (One is visible in the picture above or by clicking here.) I squinted and tried to imagine the painting without them, and I couldn't do it. That primary diagonal -- the one you can see in the JPEG -- holds up everything on the canvas. It's support, sightline, atmosphere, color, guide, path, and hint, all rolled up together. So where did it come from?

The easy answer with Diebenkorn is that it came from Matisse. On Saturday, standing in the gallery, I remembered that Diebenkorn often claimed that people read too much Matisse into his paintings. So I tried hard to expunge Matisse from my mind, to think about the other great influencer of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings, Mondrian. While there are certainly Mondrianesque Ocean Parks, I couldn't find a way to get Mondrian into No. 38, and quickly gave up. No, this one is all Matisse.

In the catalogue for her 1998 Diebenkorn retrospective, Jane Livingston points to how important Matisse's View of Notre Dame (1914) was to Diebenkorn. He first saw it at just about the time he started the Ocean Park series: The Matisse made its first American appearance in Los Angeles in early 1966. By the end of 1967, the Ocean Park series was underway. The diagonals in No. 38 -- and in plenty of other Diebenkorn Ocean Parks -- come straight out of View of Notre Dame.

In the Matisse, the dominant diagonal line serves to flatten space, to bring the painting closer to abstraction. The diagonal is so prominent that the viewer forgets to look for the place where the wall with the window meets the studio floor. With an assist from a little patch of green (a bush?!) that effectively brings Notre Dame from outside Matisse's studio window into the foreground of the painting.

Diebenkorn didn't immediately bring Matisse's flattening diagonal into his work. (After all, he didn't start the Ocean Park series until late the next year.) Ocean Park No. 6 is a fine example of Diebenkorn learning how to build an Ocean Park painting: It's a mass of squiggly horizontals in desperate need of a supporting diagonal. By No. 38 Diebenkorn figured it out. Matisse used the diagonal as an abstracting element in one of his least representational canvases. Diebenkorn had no qualms about abstraction and seized upon Matisse's trick.

More on No. 38 tomorrow....