The Phillips' two 1971 Diebenkorns

When I left off yesterday, I was writing about Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park No. 38. More specifically I was trying to perform some kind of archeology on it in an effort to 'solve' the painting, particularly its dominant diagonal.

No. 38 isn't the only 1971 Diebenkorn in the Phillips' collection, but it is the only one on view right now. After I got home from my Saturday visit to the Phillips, I dialed-up the museum's excellent American art-focused website and found the 25-inch-by-18-inch painting at left. It isn't an exact mirror image of No. 38, but key elements of No. 38 are in the work on paper and are reversed: The V-shape in the upper left of the painting, the twin diagonals, the thin yellow vertical block on the right edge of the canvas, and more.

With absolutely no justification whatsoever, I'm guessing that Diebenkorn made the smaller work before No. 38. With that assumption in place I wondered: Was Matisse's View of Notre Dame the jumping off point for Diebenkorn's smaller work, an idea which he developed into No. 38? There are so many similarities between the 1971 work on paper and the 1914 Matisse that I think Diebenkorn used the Matisse as a guide. By the time Diebenkorn painted No. 38, those guide-marks had evolved and the final work is much less about learning from the master, and much more of a classic Diebenkorn.

As always with Diebenkorn, color first. The blue that underlays the white in the Diebenkorn is strikingly similar to the color Matisse used in View. The green Diebenkorn uses in both 1971 paintings is almost identical to the mysterious green 'bush' in View. That Diebenkorn would take lessons from another painter's palette is hardly a surprise: From the mid-1950s on, Diebenkorn shamelessly riffed on the colors used by Mondrian, Bonnard, and, of course, Matisse. (Also at the Phillips, Diebenkorn's 1960 Girl with Plant is chromatically similar to Bonnard's 1921 Open Window, with the exception of the view through Diebenkorn's window, which is Rothko-ian.)

There are other relationships between the 1914 and 1971 paintings too. Diebenkorn paints a rectangle in almost the exact same height and place that Matisse puts his twin towers of Notre Dame. Diebenkorn's rectangle has just about the same proportions as Matisse's. And then there are the diagonals. Matisse's painting features two diagonals that run from the middle-right to the lower-left. Diebenkorn's does too, and they move the same way. In both paintings there is a faint third diagonal at the far right.

Also, at the top of the 1971 work-on-paper, two black horizontal lines run across the top until they are stopped by a vertical line of color. They're about the same thickness and distance apart as the two lines Matisse uses at about where the wall and floor of his studio would come together. Diebenkorn uses the same lines Matisse did, but he shoves them up higher in the picture.

And by No. 38, this is all deeply disguised. The grandson looks just enough like the grandfather for the lineage to be clear.