“Many paths, or path-like bands, in my paintings may have something to do with this experience, especially in that wherever there was agriculture going on you could see process-ghosts of former tilled fields, patches of land being eroded.”
A sublime paradigm of Richard Diebenkorn’s momentous Ocean Park series, Ocean Park #56 from 1972 displays the hallmarks of a painter at the apex of his genius as a colorist and compositional innovator, serving as powerful test.mes nt to the artist’s uncontested status within the canon of American abstract painting. Among the earliest iterations from the artist’s most iconic series of paintings, Ocean Park #56 illustrates a glorious collision of sandy beach, furls of ocean, and radiant atmosphere, all articulated in the artist’s signature abstract vernacular. Diebenkorn’s widely renowned Ocean Park series, begun in 1967 and extending over nearly twenty years, represents a remarkable feat of creative reinvention and dexterity that is as impressive as it is rare. Painted in 1972, the present work embodies a transformative moment within the Ocean Park cycle: moving away from the stark diagonals and high-keyed coloration of the earliest works from the series, the paintings of 1971 and onward achieve a subtler, more ethereal abstract beauty. As in Ocean Park #56, Diebenkorn’s line becomes more delicate; his color became more diaphanous; and his forms more fluid. This stylistic development reoriented the emotive focus of the series, heightening the paintings’ intellectual rigor and contemplative power as their reduced muscularity amplified the introspective resonance of these subtler and more elegant compositions. In the decades since the present work was executed, Diebenkorn has achieved recognition both in the United States and abroad, with examples from the Ocean Park series residing in more than forty-five museums as well as numerous private collects ions. For its all-encompassing expanse of chromatic brilliance, airy luminescence, and peerless formal execution, Ocean Park #56 endures as an important and archetypal painting from Diebenkorn’s illustrious career.
From an architectonic scaffolding of charcoal lines, a translucent passage of muted azure abuts cool bands of grayish blue hues, while above, a rectangle of periwinkle is met with tunnels of shadowy mauve and bright yellow. Thin lines of cerulean adhere to dominant forms, emphasizing a balanced framework akin to the golden ratio. Perpendicular and orthogonal lines of gray and black enclose the geometric passages of color, constructing an overarching system that organizes the abstraction. The richly underpainted zones of color and meticulously scraped, erased, and reworked areas recall the painterly process of forebears such as Willem de Kooning; pent.mes nti of earlier decisions suffuse every inch of the surface, disclosing a compelling tension between the improvisational nature of his instinctive lines with the disciplined scaffolding of the painting. Like the planes of color laid thinly atop one another in soft washes, colored lines of paint are drawn and redrawn, nearly covered, and then retraced. Adjusting this linear architecture as he constructs the composition, the artist leaves subtle nods towards what might have been while simultaneously presenting a resolved and inevitable solution.
Major Early 1970s Ocean Park Paintings in Museum collects ions (80 in+)
"The compositions were built up through periods of activity in which erasures, revisions, accretions, reworkings, and ultimately hard-won resolutions would coalesce into balanced compositions. To describe the works formally, bit by bit, is almost to miss the point, to miss the totality of the self-contained system. To experience them – how they seep out slowly and reveal the artist’s intensive process and capture an emotive quality – is the real goal.”
In 1970, just two years before he painted Ocean Park #56, Diebenkorn was invited by the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior to document the water reclamation projects in the Colorado River Valley and the Salt River in Arizona. Contemplating the landscape by means of aerial views through the window of the helicopter, Diebenkorn was further drawn to the architectonic design of the skin of the earth. From the air, land became flattened to reveal irregular grid-like patterns, emulating the surface of one of his pictures. Unveiled to Diebenkorn was a topographical viewpoint that emphasized intricate visual variety across a broad expanse—a pictorial snapshot of the junction between natural landscape, sunlight, and human intervention in the earth that categorically cemented the artist’s dedication to his influential Ocean Park paintings.
In Diebenkorn’s own words, “Many paths, or path-like bands, in my paintings may have something to do with this experience, especially in that wherever there was agriculture going on you could see process-ghosts of former tilled fields, patches of land being eroded” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, 1997, p. 112). The variegated gossamer belts of alternating blues, lilac, and golden yellow that characterize Ocean Park #56 reflect Diebenkorn’s aerial fascination in uneven land, pictorially mapping an abstract geographical territory of indistinct pathways and the quality of daylight as it hits abstract coordinates of the earth.
The Ocean Park paintings "[combine] a new interpretation of structural, formalistic concern with expressionistic and lyrical tendencies."
Diebenkorn considered himself a traditionalist and welcomed identification as a landscape painter. His work represents the synthesis of a lifet.mes of observation, both of his own surroundings and of the art historical past. The exquisite framing of the light as it appears in Ocean Park #56 is highly specific to the way light appeared in the artist’s studio; the slants and diagonals that bisect the geometric forms echo the tilted panes of his studio’s transom windows through which daylight poured. Constructed of alternating blocks of color a discernible exoskeleton of slender lines, Ocean Park #56 retains a dynamic character, as if built from the inside out. The angular vectors of color and line in the present work reverberate like the bending of a ray of light refracted through a prism or glass window, a fascination that underscores the artist’s kinship with modern masters Henri Matisse and Edward Hopper, who similarly blurred the lines between interior and exterior. As Robert T. Buck notes, the Ocean Park paintings "[combine] a new interpretation of structural, formalistic concern with expressionistic and lyrical tendencies" (Robert T. Buck in Exh. Cat., Buffalo, Albright Knox Art Gallery (and traveling), Richard Diebenkorn, Paintings and Drawings, 1943 – 1976, 1976, p. 42).
At a t.mes when much critical attention was being paid to the ostensible “death of painting,” Diebenkorn’s work reaffirmed and reassured the perpetual potential of the medium. The Ocean Park paintings provided Diebenkorn the freedom to explore, through repetition, the vast array of nuances in line, color, and structure visualized in each individual painting. Of this ambitious series, Sarah C. Bancroft writes, “Each work was for Diebenkorn an exploration of rightness: an attempt to set up problems, welcome mistakes, push through objections and self-doubt to come to a balanced resolution. The compositions were built up through periods of activity in which erasures, revisions, accretions, reworkings, and ultimately hard-won resolutions would coalesce into balanced compositions. To describe the works formally, bit by bit, is almost to miss the point, to miss the totality of the self-contained system. To experience them – how they seep out slowly and reveal the artist’s intensive process and capture an emotive quality – is the real goal” (Sarah C. Bancroft, “A View of Ocean Park,” Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (and travelling), Richard Diebenkorn, 2011-12, p. 22). A dazzling yet evoking philosophical meditation on color and perspectival space, Ocean Park #56 testifies to the transformative, enduring, and vital genius of Diebenkorn’s remarkable oeuvre.
