1998 (1997) (1999) (1990-2000) (2000-2010) Table of Contents
Peter Plagens*, Diebenkorn*, Art Forum , Feb, 1998, 1970s, 1967, 1958, 1957, 1955, 1950s, 1922 See Text
Ribot 6: Over 60 and Under 30, The Annual Report of the College of Neglected Science (CONS), 1998, pages 66 & 67. See Text
Jeffrey Stanton* Founding of Ocean Park, Web Document, April 6, 1998, 1905, 1904, 1903, 1902, 1898, 1893, 1892, 1891, 1888, 1870s, See Text
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004. (The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.), 1992, 1946, 1900s, 1542 See Text
Stephen Westfall Diebenkorn* Art in America , Oct, 1998, 1966 See Text
Formalism (Homily)
"Even though Diebenkorn often nails a kind of osmotic mise-en-scene (i.e., the Venice neighborhood after which the paintings are named), he really has nothing to say except, approximately, this: Using a moderately big format, continually fairing and truing my system of rectangles, triangles, elegant gutters, and a scrub-in/rub-out drawing, and seeing that my colors are always domesticated by at least a pinch of white, I can get pictorial harmony every time." -- Plagens, 1998
{It seems that this is something like C. Seeger, Schoenberg, Cage and maybe MacDonald-Wright were saying. KR}
Documents
Peter Plagens* Diebenkorn* ArtForum , Feb, 1998, 1970s, 1967, 1958, 1957, 1955, 1950s, 1922
"If there's one lasting impression left by the retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's* paintings at the Whitney Museum, it's an overriding sense of finicky graphic and chromatic tastefulness. And this carefully crafted rightness - almost every Diebenkorn* picture seems like the resolution to a family argument paid for by a kindly old father who wants, above all, to avoid any sign of conflict - is what makes the show seem so out of touch with the times. Of course, there's bad out-of-touch and good out-of-touch: a retrospective that reveals how academic and timid the artist's work is, compared with today's adventurous fare, doesn't make a great case for itself; a retrospective that demonstrates how comparatively decadent art has become since the heyday of its subject is another story. Which is the Diebenkorn* show?
"Anecdote no. 1: An abstract painter I once knew told me that when he was a student he had an old professor who would constantly recommend the use of Naples yellow as the solution to practically any pictorial problem. After a while, the students got together and had little Amway-like buttons made up that said, "Ask me about Naples yellow." Anecdote no. 2: When I was a painter in Los Angeles in the '70s, some of the younger, more radical artists who (plus ca change . . .) thought painting was "dead" had a nickname for Richard Diebenkorn*: Mr. Beige. Now I'm not suggesting that the staff of the Whitney sport tags saying, "Ask me about beige." But I am saying that, with the exception of a few of the early abstractions done in New Mexico and Berkeley, Diebenkorn* doesn't seem to take a hell of a lot of aesthetic chances, even within the rather polite parameters he set for his work.
"Diebenkorn's* biography is fairly standard for the second-generation Abstract Expressionists who managed, at crucial times in their careers, to find shelter in art schools and universities as faculty. Born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn became a Marine before he could graduate from Stanford. While in Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, he would use his passes to look at Matisse and Bonnard in the museums in Washington, DC. (On your checklist of Diebenkorn influences, put a big X in front of Matisse.) After the war, he returned to the West Coast and got both a job at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) and a start as an abstract painter. (San Francisco - having hosted Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still for teaching stints - was AbEx's second city.) But Diebenkorn then decided to get some more schooling, at the University of New Mexico, and, in Albuquerque, he made his first significant paintings.
"The best early '50s New Mexico abstractions (along with several paintings created in Berkeley when Diebenkorn returned to the Bay Area soon after) are crisply improvisational compositions boasting what was to become Diebenkorn's trademark moderately intense color and just enough flamboyant brushwork to give them a real edge. Early on, these qualities were enough. But later, in the "Ocean Park" series that was to occupy the artist for the last twenty-five years of his career, they weren't - the paintings become much paler and faded-looking, and his brushwork seems reined in by the composition. (Let's forget Diebenkorn's figurative interregnum, 1955-67; it's just Edward Hopper redone with thicker paint and thinner psychology.)
"The trouble, in general, with the "Ocean Park" paintings is the same reliance on pure taste that plagues the work of Helen Frankenthaler. (In fact, a lot of Diebenkorn looks like Frankenthaler laid over a masculine grid.) Even though Diebenkorn often nails a kind of osmotic mise-en-scene (i.e., the Venice neighborhood after which the paintings are named), he really has nothing to say except, approximately, this: Using a moderately big format, continually faring and truing my system of rectangles, triangles, elegant gutters, and a scrub-in/rub-out drawing, and seeing that my colors are always domesticated by at least a pinch of white, I can get pictorial harmony every time. That's nice - especially at a moment when galleries are filled with militantly ugly paintings. But you want a little more from a major museum retrospective (or at least I do).
"I want some hairy eccentricity - like, say, that of Frank Lobdell, a still-living contemporary of Diebenkorn who, in a just world, would get a show like this one. I want some breathtaking excitement, like you get from, say, Sam Francis'* The Whiteness of the Whale, 1957-58. Yes, Francis* churned out an awful lot of decoratively tachiste crap over the years, but when his best paintings are measured against Diebenkorn's*, it's no contest as to who was the greater California painter. And I want a body of work that, in the end, inspires awe rather than a grade. The grade? A-minus, if you must know. But it's academic."
"Peter Plagens* is art critic for Newsweek magazine and a painter."
Ribot 6: Over 60 and Under 30, The Annual Report of the College of Neglected Science (CONS), 1998, pages 66 & 67.
Includes works by Llyn Foulkes* who, as his one man band, performed at the Church in Ocean Park, and by John Baldessari* who lived here and who now lives here in Ocean Park. On the unindexed page 154 of Ribot 6 is an announcement of The America Awards' winners for 1997 with the International awarded to Friederike Mayröcker (Austria) by the Judges: Peter Constantine, Peter Glassgold, Douglas Messerli, Marjorie Perloff, Paul Vangelisti, Mac Wellman; the Poetry went to The Silhouette of the Bridge, Avec Books, by Keith Waldrop; Judges: Charles Bernstein, Norma Cole, Marjorie Welish.
Jeffrey Stanton* Founding of Ocean Park, Web Document, April 6, 1998, 1888
"After Abbot Kinney* built his summer home in Santa Monica in 1886, he became interested in land development along the Pacific Coast. Although the real estate market crash of 1888 derailed his plans to develop the area which is now Pacific Palisades, he shifted his attention to the coastal area south of Santa Monica in 1891.
"Kinney* and his partner Francis Ryan* acquired a controlling interest in the Ocean Park Casino (actually a restaurant and tennis club) on June 23, 1891. Several months later they decided to purchase the surrounding tract of land for $175,000 from Captain Hutchinson*, a British Army officer. The man had acquired the beach front property in the late 1870's when he foreclosed on a series of loans made to the Machado* family on parts of their La Ballona Rancho.
"The plot of land which extended 1-1/2 miles south of what is now Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica to Mildred Avenue in Venice, for the most part extended inland only 1000 feet, but curved eastward to a depth of half a mile along the southern end. The northern third located in Santa Monica had development potential, while the remainder in county territory was wetlands consisting of sand dunes and marsh.
"They quickly realized that the success of their beach resort would require reliable, inexpensive and direct rail service from Los Angeles. But Santa Monica businessmen, who feared competition to their North Beach resort, persuaded Colis Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad to be uncooperative. Instead Kinney* enticed the rival Santa Fe Railroad to extend their Inglewood line north to his resort and donated twelve acres to its right of way. The first train arrived at its Hill Street depot on June 18, 1892.
"But it wasn't until the following spring that the first advertisements appeared for Kinney* and Ryan*'s "Santa Monica Tract." The 25 x 100 foot lots were priced at $100 and featured piped water. As an incentive to purchasers, three small four room cottages were built and lottery was held. They were given to the lucky buyers who drew the lot on which they stood. Lots naturally sold well, even in those bad economic times. Tents were erected on unsold lots and were available to campers for summer rental.
"The YMCA of Southern California, after a long search, accepted Kinney* and Ryan*'s offer of a five acre strip of land. They erected a large bathhouse there that summer and a two story pavilion for religious meetings the following year.
"The community was renamed Ocean Park in May 1895. The community grew slowly until there were nearly 150 cottages by Spring 1898. That year proved to be a boom year as several new business buildings and forty beach cottages were constructed. Kinney*'s new 40 acre Ocean Park race track and golf links located near their Casino Country Club at southern end of the property opened.
"The city of Santa Monica on June 30, 1898 granted Kinney and Ryan permission to build a 1250 foot long pier at Pier Avenue on pilings already being used to carry the city's 200 foot long outfall sewer. The pier served two purposes; to protect and extend the sewage pipes seaward so the currents wouldn't pollute their property south of it, and as a pleasure wharf for tourists and fishermen. The pier was completed in less than six weeks.
"Francis Ryan* didn't live much longer to enjoy their success. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in October. His widow quickly remarried and Kinney suddenly had a new partner. Thomas Dudley* was a Santa Monica businessman and politician who was elected as a Trustee the following year. Despite political connections, municipal assistance for their resort produced few results and city services were lacking. When Dudley* finally sold his half interest in the resort in February 1902 for $400,000, it was a clear indication that Santa Monica's business establishment feared that Kinney's resort would draw tourist dollars from their North Beach resort, and that it would not support Kinney*'s plan to compete against Sherman and Clark's Los Angeles Pacific trolley service.
"Kinney*'s three new partners, Alexander Frase*r, Henry Gage* and George Meritt Jones* immediately invested in improvements. Their plans included installing a sewer system for the community, extending the beach walkway to the extreme end of their tract, developing the residential tract immediately south of Rose Avenue, and constructing a large bathhouse. Unfortunately Kinney* didn't get along with them, probably because they refused to support any of his projects. First they weren't willing to make enemies of powerful rival businessmen by supporting Kinney's rival trolley company. Secondly they were more interested in their money losing Casino (restaurant and vaudeville theater) that they built beside the pier. Thirdly, they disagreed on how the wetlands on the southern portion of their land should be developed.
"Kinney*'s strategy was two-fold. First he made plans to create an independent municipality south of Marine Street in unincorporated County territory, and second to get rid of his partners. By September 1903, his supporters began circulating a petition proposing a new 6th class city to be called Ocean Park. An election was scheduled for February 13, 1904.
"The partners finally agreed to dissolve their partnership and divide their holdings based on the flip of a coin. They met at the company's offices for one last time in late January 1904. One of the partners tossed a coin high in the air. Kinney called "Tails" and the coin landed on the floor tails up. The three partners contemplated what they would do with their mostly worthless water logged land.
*Kinney* examined the coin carefully in his hand. It was a decision that he had previously thought about long and hard. "Ill take the salt marshes", he replied. His partners gasped in amazement and smiled in relief. Kinney*, always the dreamer, would build his Venice of America on that seemingly worthless land.
"Kinney's former partners improved their resort by spending $185,000 in 1905 to built their Ocean Park Plunge, an ornate indoor hot salt water swimming pool. It opened the same weekend that Kinney's Venice of America opened, July 4, 1905."
The material is copyrighted © 1998 by Jeffrey Stanton*.
Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004.
(The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.)
The Light of L.A.
" . . . It's that light! That's the light I keep telling you girls about." you girls: her mother and her. That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles-golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I've found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California.
" . . . everybody knew exactly what I was talking about. The light of the place is a subject that Angelenos are endlessly voluble about -only, it turns out, people bring all sorts of different, and sometimes even diametrically opposite, associations to the subject.
"For example, David Hockney maintains that the extravagant light of Los Angeles was one of the strongest lures drawing him to Southern California in the first place, more than thirty years ago -and, in fact, long before that. "As a child, growing up in Bradford, in the North of England, across the gothic gloom of those endless winters," he recalls, "I remember how my father used to take me along with him to see the Laurel* and Hardy movies. And one of the things I noticed right away, long before I could even articulate it exactly, was how Stan and Ollie, bundled in their winter overcoats, were casting these wonderfully strong, crisp shadows. We never got shadows of any sort in winter. And already I knew that someday I wanted to settle in a place with winter shadows like that. In fact years later, when I staged The Magic Flute, its aspect of the story that I keyed onto-this journey from darkness toward the light, how the light pulls and pulls you. It certainly did me, anyway; the light and those strong, crisp shadows."
Robert Irwin*, one of the presiding masters of L.A.'s Light and Space artistic movement of the late sixties and early seventies, and a native Angeleno, concurred that there's something extraordinary about the light of L.A., though he said that it was sometimes hard to characterize it exactly.
"The thing is it's so radically different from day to day," he explained, "and then so incredibly specific on any given day."
"One of its most common features, however," he suggested, "is the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world has almost no shadows. Broad daylight - and, in fact, lots and lots of light - and no shadows. Really peculiar, almost dreamlike.
"It's a high light, as opposed to the kind of deep light you might get, say in the Swiss Alps, where your eye keeps getting drawn to the object- say, to that snow-capped peak on the far end of the valley. Here, instead, you're likely to find your eye becoming suspended somewhere in the middle distance, and it can almost get to be as if the world were made up of energy rather than matter."
"I love walking down the street when the light gets all reverberant, bouncing around like that, and everything's just humming in your face."
"A few days after my conversation with Irwin, I happened to be talking with John Bailey, the cinematographer, most recently of As Good As It Gets, and he energetically confirmed Irwin's observation: "I have a sophisticated light meter, which in my work I'm always consulting. Most places in the world when it's overcast enough so that you get no shadows, the meter lets you know you have to set your apeture a stop to a stop and a half below full sun. Here in L.A. the same kind of diffuse light, no shadows -I could hardly believe the first time I encountered this -and my meter will read almost the same as for full sunlight. Other days, though, you'll be getting open sun, which, of course, here means open desert sun- a harshly contrasting light. After all, for all its human settlement, the Southland is still this freak of nature-a desert abutting the sea. And open desert light is very harsh -you get these deep, deep shadows. Your eye subjectively makes these incredibly sophisticated adjustments so that you're able to see into the shadows, but filmstock tends to be incapable of such subtleties: you get the sunlit area and what's in shadow just reads as black, unless you compensate with fill-light aimed into the dark patches. . . ."
"I mentioned the Laurel* and Hardy shadows of Hockney's youth. "Exactly," Bailey said, "Shadows and no shadows -that's the duality of L.A. light, isn't it? And how appropriate for a place where the sun rises in the desert and sets in the ocean."
"But for all that, the main thing about the light here is its consistency," Bailey continued. "Of course, the early independent producers originally made their way out here, toward the end of the first decade of this century, so as to get out from under the thumb of the Edison Trust." . . . back in New York and New Jersey, Thomas Edison initially attempted to enforce a dubiously broad patent hegemony through the creation of a trust which deployed lawyers, detectives, thugs, and even sharpshooters to upend the efforts of any mavericks who refused to fork over the arbitrarily mandated licensing fees. . . . one of the main things that L.A. had going for it at the outset in those early days was its geographic location . . . "from the Mexican border and escape from any injunctions and subpoenas."
"But what they really stumbled upon here," Bailey went on, "was the consistency of the light. So much light, and so many days of it. Back east they'd have to cease production throughout the winter: all those gray cold days when even if the cameras didn't freeze up, they'd barely be able to register anything on film without the use of banks and banks of these incredibly expensive klieg lights." ( . . . such light banks became even more prohibitively expensive during the ensuing decade, when war-inspired shortages seriously constricted the supplies of coal necessary to power them.) . . . But here there were hardly any clouds and the light on any given day stayed consistent pretty much the whole day through.
" . . . .
" . . . I called Hal Zirin, out at Caltech -the man who founded . . . the solar observatory up at Big Bear Lake. I suppose I was wondering how the sun itself looked in the light of L.A. "Ah, Southern California," Zirin responded, with improbably enthusiasm. "God's gift to astronomy!" . . .
" . . . Mount Wilson, Mount Palomar, the Griffith Observatory, our solar observatory out at Big Bear . . . It's not for nothing that during the first two-thirds of this century a good three-quarters of the most significant discoveries in astronomy were made here in Southern California.
" . . .
" . . . it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness of the air around L.A. It goes back to that business people are always talking about-a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current. Because, owing to the rotation of the earth, the prevailing currents in the northern hemisphere run clockwise; eastwardly along the equator, in this instance, till they hit Asia, at which point warm tropical currents arch northward, skirting Japan, until they eventually curve back beneath Alaska, where they cool before running southward along the California coast. Hence, the cold California current. And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin-so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and gets trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surface air progressively cools as it rises. There's a relative lack of clouds- clouds of course being a big problem if you're trying to observe the heavens- because there's relatively little evaporation over the cool water. And the atmosphere below the inversionn layer is incredibly stable. You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may have been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still. . . . That's the stable air of L.A."
" . . . "have you noticed, for instance, how if you go out to the Arizona desert, say, it may be incredibly clear but the road off in the distance is shimmering? That's the heat rising in waves off the surface of the ground. On the other hand, go out to the Santa Monica palisade and gaze out over the cool water. It's completely clear and distinct, clean out to the horizon. The heat rising from the ground in most places-or, rather, the resultant interplay of pockets of hot and cold air, acting like distorting lenses in the atmosphere up above-is in turn what makes stars shimmer and twinkle in the night sky. A twinkling star can be be very pretty and romantic, but twinkling is distortion, by definition, and if you're an astronomer you want your star-or, for that matter, your sun, if that's what you're looking at-to be distortion-free: solid as a rock. And that's what you get here. The stars don't twinkle in L.A."
"And, it occurred to me, that might also account for the preternatural clarity of the encircling mountains, off in the distance-that hushed sense you sometimes get that you could reach out and touch them-on those smog-free days, that is, when you're able to see them at all.
" . . .
" . . . Glen Cass, at Caltech, . . . professor of environmental engineering with a very specific interest in smog: he could care less about its carcinogenic implications, or its contribution to everything from emphysema to the thinning of the ozone layer; what obsesses him is the effect of air pollution on visibility-in other words, exactly why it is that some afternoons he can go up on the roof of the Millikan Library there at Caltech, gaze out toward the towering San Gabriel Mountains, less than five miles to the north, and not make out a thing through the bright, white (shadow-obliterating) atmospheric haze.
" . . . I grew up here in Pasadena, and when I was a kid the mountains were a marvelous everyday presence, as indeed they remained until the fifties and sixties when smog really began to get out of hand. It may be that the experience of smog-and for that matter of light generally-is so pronounced here in L.A. as opposed to elsewhere because the uninterrupted visual range is so potentially vast. We live on a flat expanse, sloping gently toward the ocean and backed up against these really huge mountains. [Mount Wilson is almost a mile high, Mount Baldy, 10,080 feet, and San Gorgonio Mountain, 11,502, all of them rising straight up from sea level.] Maybe people elsewhere aren't so aware of the reduced visual range caused by their own air pollution . . . because they can't see that far horizontally . . .
""Well, it turns out that ther are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air-from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse," he explained. "Some of those-and especially the larger ones-simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and say, that mountain over there. They blot out or defract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual details to your eyes. Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem. Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size-about half a micrometer, to be exact-that constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibiltiy.
"And the thing about particles of that size is that they happen to have about the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight. So that, when the sunlight from over my shoulder, say, hits one of those particles floating between me and the mountain that I'm trying to make out, the light bounces off the particle and right into my eye. On some days there can be billions of such particles in the line of sight between me and the mountain-each of them with the mirrorlike potential to bounce white sunlight directly back into my eye. It can get to be like having a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you're trying to see. That's what the white stuff is. And we have a technical term for it.
" . . .
"We call it airlight."
"The next morning, I happened to be jogging on the beach in Santa Monica, heading north, in the direction of Malibu, as the sun was rising behind me. The sky was alread bright, though the sun was still occluded behind a low-clinging fog bank over LAX. The Malibu mountains up ahead were dark and clear and distinct . . . Presently, the sun must have broken out from behind the fog bank-I realized this because suddenly the sand around me turned pale purplish pink and my own long shadow shot out before me. I looked up at the mountains and they were gone: lost in the airlight.
" . . .
"Actually, the air-pollution situation in L.A. has been improving . . . .
"There are fewer and fewer days of sheer airlight whiteout . . .
"Nevertheless, the light seems more uncanny than ever-or, rather, it may simply be reverting to its original splendor. What with the thermal inversion, even as the smog has subsided a softer version of airlight phenomenon has persisted -one that Juan Cabrillo, the first European to venture into these parts, back in 1542 . . . noted, labeled the curve of shore "The Bay of Smokes." Back in 1946, Carey McWilliams, the poet laureate of California historians, recorded how, the region's aridity notwithstanding, "the charm of Southern California is largely to be found in the air and light. Light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutally interacting, thoroughly interpenetrated."
When the sunlight is not screened and filtered by the moisture laden air, the land is revealed in all its semiarid poverty. The bald, sculptured mountains stand forth in a harsh and glaring light. But let the light turn soft with ocean mist, and miraculous changes occur. The bare mountain ranges, appallingly harsh in contour, suddenly become wrapped in an entrancing ever-changing loveliness of light and shadow . . . and the land itself becomes a thing of beauty.
McWilliams went on to point out how, typically, desert light "brings out the sharpness of points, angles, and forms. But . . .this is not a desert light nor is it tropical for it has neutral tones. (Elsewhere he suggests that "the color of the land is in the light.) It is Southern California light and it has no counterpart in the world."
" . . . recalling McWilliam's comments . . . with the architect Coy Howard, . . . "It's an incredibly loaded subject - this diaphanous soup we live in . . . It feels primeval - there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non-hierarchical. It's not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, 'dramatic' is exactly what it's not. If anything, it's meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it. In places where you get a crisp, sharp light with deep, clean shadows -which you do get here sometimes -you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we ge here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity-not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows, not just all day but at night as well, and the opacity melts away into translucency, and even transparency."
" . . . Howard tried again.
"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing-the object-and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection, as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say, and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here-the air, the atmosphere, the light-that makes everything shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world -the diaphanous soup I was talking about-which, in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence."
"The poet Paul Vangelisti knew exactly what Coy Howard was getting at when I related our conversation to him. . . .
. . .the pigeon flock soaring and tumbling every noon silver then white then sunlight against the weight of air at the window."Coy Howard's associations run to seagulls and mine run to pigeons-maybe not that surprising a convergence after all, since birds are the true citizens of light. But I know just what he means about the sense of threeness-silver then white then sunlight-and about the meditative, as opposed to the dramatic, quality of the light here."
"The light is a constantly recurring theme among the poets of L.A., but I can think of few whose work is as light-saturated, as light-blasted, as Vangelisti's. . . .
"For one thing . . . I think the light of L.A. is the whitest light I've ever seen, and the sky is one of the highest. . . . there's a strange thing that happens with the sense of distance and of expanse. Because from here in Echo Park the ocean off in the distance is oceanic, but so is the intervening land, and indeed so is the sky. It's that even, undifferentiated, non-hierarchical quality Coy Howard is talking about. And a weird thing is how that light yields a simultaneous sense of distance and of flatness: things seem very sharp up close and far away, with nothing in between. and the uncanny result is that you lose yourself-somehow not outwardly, but, rather, inwardly. Here the light draws you inward."
"Anne Ayres, the gallery director at the Otis Institute, told me that some days the light of L.A. can drive her into a state of "egoless bliss." . . .
" . . . the director Peter Bogdanovich, " . . . I hate the way the light of the place throws you into such a trance that you fail to realize how time is passing. It's like what Orson Welles once told me. "The terrible thing about L.A. . . . is that you sit down, you're twenty-five, and when you get up you're sixty-two."
"But light is over!" Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at MOCA, . . . "There hasn't been light in this city for more than ten years now." [He organized Helter Skelter, a show] . . . to prove precisely that in 1992. On first arriving in L.A., in 1981, Schimmel had half expected to encounter some third- or fouth-generation version of the Light and Space orthodoxies that had come to be so closely identified with the L.A. art scene during the sixties and the early seventies - through the hegemony of masters ranging from Robert Irwin* to Richard Diebenkorn*. Instead, he found a younger generation of artists-exemplified by the likes of Mike Kelley and Nancy Rubins-who seemed to have rejected the light aesthetic entirely, opting instead for a decidely darker, seedier, more grimly unsettling and dystopian view of the L.A. realtiy. "Partly," Schimmel speculated, "this was because by the late seventies and early eighties light in L.A. had been so academicized that it had really become little more than a commercial cliché. There was nowhere else to go with it. In part, too, long before a lot of other people, these artists were onto some of the bleak social transformations that were eroding the city itself. Helter Skelter closed on a Sunday, and the worst riots in the city's history erupted the following Wednesday."
"Of course, in its very title, the Helter Skelter show acknowledged the fact that its countervision of the L.A. reality was itself rooted in a long countertradition-one that wended back from the Manson murders into the noir world of the great crime novelists and filmmakers of the thirties and forties. It's interesting how those noir novelists and filmmakers almost completely inoculated themselves against the blandishments of the light of L.A., in part by setting most of their scenes either at night or indoors - in fact, usually both. . . .
" . . .
" . . . [D.J.] Waldie . . . said, "The light around here is quite remarkable, isn't it? In fact, I gave the matter some thought on my walk home this evening. And it seems to me, actually that there are four-or, anyway, at least four-lights in L.A. To begin with, there's the cruel, actinic light of late July. Its glare cuts piteously through the general shabbiness of Los Angeles. Second comes the nostalgic, golden light of late October. It turns Los Angeles into El Dorado, a city of fool's gold. It's the light William Faulkner-in his story Golden Land-called "treacherous unbrightness. It's the light the tourists come for-the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia. Third, there's the gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July. Summer in Los Angeles doesn't begin until mid-July. In the months befoe, the light can be as monotonous as Seattle's. Finally comes the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized: each perfect, specific, ideal little tract house, one beside the next. And that's the light that breaks hearts in L.A,"
" . . ."
" . . . Vin Scully . . . the legendary radio announcer for the L.A. Dodgers, has spent his life in that life, broadcasting the sunset itself . . . "come late July, with the sun setting off third base, the air actually turns purple tinged with gold . . ."
" . . . my maternal grandfather, an Austrian Jewish modernist composer Ernst Toch, found himself exiled into that light. He and my grandmother lived on the Franklin Street hill, at the very edge of Santa Monica and Brentwood, north of Wilshire, in a house facing out toward the Santa Monica Mountains. . . .
" . . . "Well, no wonder you can compose, with a view like that!"
" . . . "Well, acually, no. When I compose, I have to close the curtains."
Stephen Westfall Diebenkorn, Art in America , Oct, 1998, 1966, 1914
". . .
"The arc of Diebenkorn's career up until that point would be enough to ensure his place in art history. But the most profound developments in his painting lay ahead. The will to abstraction was never far from his figurative work. John Elderfield has pointed out that the anonymity of his figures, especially in their blankness of expression or entire lack of facial features, helped redistribute expressive energy throughout the surface of his pictures.(3) The master of this figurative formalism is Matisse. In early 1966, a year and a half after visiting the great Matisses at the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in Russia, Diebenkorn saw a Matisse exhibition at UCLA, where he was weighing an offer to come teach. Two paintings in particular bowled him over, View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both from 1914. The first painting interposes a shadowy blue wash over a view from the studio window of the Cathedral across the Seine; each element is roughly indicated with minimal linear gestures that leave their corrective adjustments exposed. The second painting is almost totally abstract, divided into essentially four vertical planes of color that indicate a space receding into interior shadow. These paintings clarified the principal elements--the architectural delineations and perspectives, and the shifting atmospheric planes of color--that distinguish Diebenkorn's epic "Ocean Park" series, which he began in late 1967, a year after moving to Santa Monica.
"In a beautiful homage to the artist, the Whitney cut away large sections of the wall dividing the "Ocean Park" works from the "Berkeley" paintings and early landscapes, creating a wide corridor that allowed viewers to recall at a glance the tendencies that recur and evolve through each phase. For, of course, Diebenkorn had been pursuing throughout his career those elements that are so isolated and refined in the 1914 Matisse paintings. In her contribution to the catalogue, Ruth A. Fine, concentrating on the representational work, says, "Diebenkorn knew absolutely that what's so extraordinary about drawing from nature, what keeps the experience constantly alive and challenging is that no subject looks precisely the same for any length of time."(4) Partly because of their grounding in drawing, the "Ocean Park" paintings may be the one great body of frontal, geometrically designed abstract painting to give a sense of time unfolding. Diebenkorn's endless tinkerings, erasures, washings over, perspectival shifts, changes in line thickness and velocity form a bridge between his works on paper and canvas.
"The "Ocean Park" works record a mind saturated with the mechanics and mysteries of apprehending space in landscape and architecture, and with the memory of art. These works show an artist ruminating by touch on a pictorial scale the body can enter wholly. Their address to the viewer is total, as total as painting can be, and yet they seem to keep something in reserve an informed gravity behind all the airiness. This emotional tone permeates all of Diebenkorn's work and may reflect his lifelong struggle to balance his bemused skepticism about obvious passions and his profound faith in the efficacy of pressing ahead with the tools of his practice. I love the scrap of paper from his studio that Livingston quotes: "I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple."(5)
"The heraldic emblems make a return appearance in the closing chapter of Diebenkorn's work, taking center stage in the early '80s. In the catalogue, Elderfield reevaluates this underrated and underexamined last period and analyzes Diebenkorn's tendency to depart from his path at regular intervals.(6) The late works, mostly on paper, were slighted by the Whitney installation (which seemed to be in a hurry to close: even the Ocean Parks looked jammed together). They nevertheless proved enchanting. The Ocean Parks exerted an obvious influence on Brice Marden, and these Diebenkorn collages and gouaches dance with decorative energies which can be seen in the work of such '80s artists as Philip Taaffe and Ross Bleckner. But it's a richer, stranger, more virtuosic and historically informed dance; botanical silhouettes undulate in Minoan rhythms and colors take on a bejeweled Byzantine intensity. The show ends with a small gouache on paper that looks like a morphing of an Ocean Park composition into a mystical Paul Klee landscape. In the upper right-hand corner a black circle floats inside a horizontal diamond like an all-seeing eye, a Symbolist emblem for the reach of Diebenkorn's own vision.
1) Jane Livingston, (ed.), The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, with essays by Jane Livingston, Ruth A. Fine and John Elderfield, Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the University of California Press, 1997, p. 57.
2) Livingston, p. 77.
3) John Elderfield, "Figure and Field," in the exhibition catalogue Richard Diebenkorn, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1991, p. 21.
4) Fine, "Reality: Digested, Transmuted, and Twisted," The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, p. 98.
5) Quoted in Livingston, p. 42.
6) Elderfield, "Leaving Ocean Park," The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, pp. 107-15. "Richard Diebenkorn," curated by Jane Livingston, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art [Oct. 9, 1997-Jan. 11, 1998]; it traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [Feb. 8-Apr. 12], and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. [May 9-Aug. 16]. It is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Oct. 9, 1998-Jan. 19,1999]."