Art: California in Eupeptic Color

Some landscapes were invented by painters and carry their names. The stone farmhouse on a lavender Proveçnal hill proclaims Cézanne; the shuttered hotel room with a blue glimpse of sea beyond a curlicued balcony announces Matisse. On a less exalted level, can one drive through rural Pennsylvania and not think of Andrew Wyeth? It happens in California too, through the work of Richard Diebenkorn.

If one has admired Diebenkorn's paintings of the late '50s, like Balcony, 1958, or View from the Porch, 1959, one comes to see the coastal suburbs of California in terms of them. Parallels of white curb and bright green lawn, the rising streets and bright evanescent houses, the thickly painted figures with features eroded by light, the sharp eupeptic color—emerald, persimmon, rust, ultramarine: the work was a discovery, a naming. For a time most young painters in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Diebenkorn studied and taught art in the late '40s and '50s, tried to do it, or something like it.

Landscape as Cop-Out. These paintings, central to the so-called West Coast look, were the figurative works of a man who had once been an abstract painter and would become one again; purist criticism gave them short shrift. Landscape was regarded as the abstractionist's copout. Diebenkorn's work was described as abstract expressionism (the New York style par excellence) diluted for West Coast palates. If not unserious, at least it was not major. "It was always a putdown for me in the '50s," recalls Diebenkorn, 55, a big, reticent man with a no-nonsense bearing. "There were, one was told, all the New York artists doing strictly abstract painting; but according to Art News I was nothing but a landscapist. I resented being cut out from the rest, some of whom were as much or as little landscapists as myself."

No fear of that now. Diebenkorn's retrospective of more than 130 works, originally organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and now at New York's Whitney Museum, is as masterly a demonstration of a sensibility in growth as any living painter could set forth. He is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn's best paintings mediate between the moral duty to acknowledge the ancestor and the desire to claim one's own experience as unique, unrepeatable. In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words "high seriousness" might have been invented.

The curious thing is that, in hind sight, the once criticized swings between abstract and figurative in Diebenkorn's work seem not to matter. Beyond them, one sees the profound consistency with which he has pursued his essential lan guage as a painter — how the zigzagging pipes under the basin in Corner of Studio — Sink, 1963, relate to the angular chops of dark shadow in his earlier Berkeley landscapes, and are exquisitely refined in the later Ocean Parks; how the vitreous transparencies of his Californian rooms in the late '50s, gridded by mul lions and tabletops, become the sharp glazed intercuts of Ocean Park No. 83,1975.