2000 (1999) (2001) (1990-2000) (2000-2010) Table of Contents

Sources

Elizabeth Broun Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 6, 1968. Oil, 233.7 x 182.9 cm (92 x 72 in.). Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith, National Museum of American Art, 2000, 1993, 1968, 1967   See Text
nmaa-ryder.si.edu/journal/v13n2/broun.html

Jorge Caruso SMMR Endorses 3 Council Incumbents, Leaves 1 Open Seat; Tenants Group Also Backs 2 Latinos for School Board, The LookOut News, 7 August 2000, 1907   See Text

Peggy Clifford Santa Monica's Wright* Brothers: The Muralist and The Writer Santa Monica Mirror, 1 January 2000, 1 (29) See Text

Paul M. Davis, Justin L. Rubinstein, Kelly H. Liu, Stephen S. Gao and Leon Knopoff Northridge Earthquake Damage Caused by Geologic Focusing of Seismic Waves, Science, 289, no. 5485, 9/8/2000, pp.1746-1750, 1994

Gerald Nordland, Catalogue Essay: Richard Diebenkorn* (1922-1993), 2000, 1984, 1971, 1969, 1960s See Text

Rivera/Roberts Correspondence, 2000, 1994 See Text

Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
37. Bay Street Craftsman Cluster, circa 1900 See Text

D. J. Waldie Our New Jerusalems: Recent Terrains: Terraforming The American West. Photographs By Laurie Brown, Poetry By Martha Ronk, Essay By Charles E. Little; Johns Hopkins University Press: 98 pp., Paper, Los Angeles Times Book Review 24 December 2000, Foreward  See Text

Documents

Elizabeth Broun Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 6, 1968. Oil, 233.7 x 182.9 cm (92 x 72 in.). Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith, National Museum of American Art, 2000, 1993, 1968. 1967
nmaa-ryder.si.edu/journal/v13n2/broun.html

     "It's a painting with a lot of what we used to call presence and authority, which I now take to mean that it sweeps away the cobwebs of art history and creates its own present. It's almost eight feet tall and exactly six feet wide&emdash;about the reach of a grown man. The canvas is vertical, with uneven parallel strips of color that flex roughly at midpoint, the way a figure bends at the waist and legs. Lines vertically divide two of the color strips, until they are interrupted at the middle of the canvas. . . . ". . . Diebenkorn's turn to abstraction began in 1967, the year after his move from Berkeley to a neighborhood of Venice called Ocean Park. This painting, created in 1968, was early in the series that would run for almost two decades, . . .

     " . . .

     "The idea that representation and abstraction are about different things has been a constant topic in the literature about the artist, though writers like John Elderfield have proposed a convergence. Diebenkorn's studio notes refer to the"limited range of possibilities" of abstract painting on the one hand, but also to "another set of things" that abstract painting can bring out-something beyond landscape, still life, and the figure. He said, "I wanted it both ways-a figure with a credible face-but also painting wherein the shapes, including the face shape, worked with the allover power I'd come to feel was a requisite of a total work." Wanting it both ways, he felt, was "an inherent trap." One part of his deep involvement with Matisse was that the older artist had managed to avoid that trap. For instance, he occasionally simply omitted facial features from his figure paintings, a device Diebenkorn also used.

     "Over decades, Diebenkorn found other solutions. He once said,"Temperamentally I have always been a landscape painter," so it's reasonable to look to the landscapes first for clues. They tend to arrange bands of color parallel to the picture plane and then introduce at least one plunging diagonal&emdash;a freeway, aquaduct, coastline, or railing-with a directional thrust that creates a deep space in the flatness of the painted surface. Diebenkorn can summarize in a single diagonal centuries of knowledge about the way single-point perspective creates spatial illusion. Although his landscapes often are seen from a height or a window, the receding color bands never completely flatten or tilt up to press against the picture plane.

     "In Diebenkorn's interiors, converging walls and floor create the same spatial effect, prying open the tight seal of the picture plane to make a room. Usually that room is inhabited. Diebenkorn painted more women than men, and mostly they sit in chairs or read or drink coffee. Their arms and legs are often crossed in gestures echoing the diagonals that create the room space. Sometimes there's no figure but just a chair or table with arms and legs at angles, their contours conforming to the space within the frame. The empty chair seems to "remember" the figure, as if holding a place for someone who stepped away momentarily, or who perhaps left behind an even more profound absence. Diebenkorn discovered so many ways of making up and peopling space that we come to recognize it as familiar and intimate, distinctly his space. Whether a landscape, interior, figure, or abstraction, his world feels experienced and lived, and all of a piece. And so the sloping curves in Ocean Park No. 6 trigger thoughts of bent backs, while the more straightly drawn oblique angles in the same painting evoke the corner of a room.

     "Part of the satisfaction of Diebenkorn's work is the way elements that are widely separated in space meet on the canvas surface. He may place a figure so that it just touches-in two dimensions-the corner of a distant window. He aligns figures' heads with the horizon, embedding them visually in the distance even though they occupy a foreground nearer to us. This allows him to open up the plane and occupy the space within, while he's still standing outside the frame and watching from a single vantage point. In Ocean Park No. 6, curves and diagonals sometimes interrupt adjacent straight edges and sometimes are bound by them, an interpenetration of form and space that conveys abstractly the same double meaning. It's as if he were reminding us of life's paradox-that we are at once actors on the stage and observers with our individual points of view.

     "Since I first saw Ocean Park No. 6, Richard Diebenkorn has died in 1993, leaving a legacy that is more and more recognized as significant. . . . "

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Jorge Caruso SMMR Endorses 3 Council Incumbents, Leaves 1 Open Seat; Tenants Group Also Backs 2 Latinos for School Board, The LookOut News, 7 August 2000, 1907

     "Santa Monica voted for a $500 limit on civil fines in 1907."

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Peggy Clifford Santa Monica's Wright* Brothers: The Muralist and The Writer Santa Monica Mirror, 1 January 2000, 1 (29)

     "They were the other Wright brothers. Born in Virginia, they grew up in Santa Monica, where their father managed the Arcadia Hotel, and each brother forged an utterly idiosyncratic and distinguished life for himself, defying society and each other. 

   "The older brother built his literary career on his unalloyed scorn for Los Angeles, while the younger Wright* secured his place in the art world when, after years in Paris and New York, he came home to Southern California to live and teach and make some of his most original and substantive work. 

  "The younger brother, Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973) attended Santa Monica High School and, while still a teenager, went to Paris to study art-first at the Sorbonne, later at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. With a colleague, Morgan Russell, he founded the Synchromist movement, the only American contribution to the European avant garde in the years before World War I. Synchromism has been described as "a style of near or complete abstraction, emphasizing effects of light through planes of color." 

   "The younger Wright was represented in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913 and moved back to America in 1916. After several years in New York, he returned to Southern California, where he lived in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, spending much time in Asia. In 1922, he was appointed director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles. In the 1930s, he directed the WPA Federal Arts Project in Southern California and, from 1942 to 1954, he taught Oriental Art and Aesthetics at UCLA, and went on to become a Fulbright exchange professor to Japan. From 1958 onward, he spent part of every year in a Zen monastery in Japan. 

   "His Santa Monica murals, though they occupied only a few years in a long, productive and various life, comprise a unique and significant portion of both his own oeuvre and the city's cultural heritage and resources. 

  " In the mid-1930s, Wright designed the murals in Santa Monica's City Hall and old Public Library, as well as painting the fire curtain mural and designing the tile mosaic in the lobby in Barnum Hall on the campus of Santa Monica High School . . . His work, Synchromy in Purple, is in the American Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

   "The house where Wright once lived on Eighteenth Street in Santa Monica also features some of his works. 

   "The City Hall murals are done in petrachrome, a process Wright developed which combines cement with crushed bits of marble, tile and granite. One of the City Hall murals depicts the arrival of the Spanish explorers in Southern California and the Mexican settlement. The other features such 1930s elements as sailboats, airplanes and road races, Two of the three library murals are stored in the Smithsonian Institution, while the third is on loan to the Santa Monica College library. 

  "Like the fire curtain mural, Landing of the Vikings in Vinland, the Barnum Hall lobby mosaic depicts the Vikings, the symbol of Samohi. Both of the works were done in 1937. 

   "Landing of the Vikings measures 20 x 40 feet and is painted on a primed asbestos curtain.

   "The older brother, Willard Huntington Wright (1888-1939) dropped out of Pomona College, was kicked out of Harvard for drinking absinthe in class and went abroad to study in Paris and Munich. At 22, he became the L.A. Times' literary critic and was promptly labeled "the boy iconoclast of Southern California" for his assaults on L.A. (i.e., "Hypocrisy, like a vast fungus, has spread over the city's surface"). In short order, he was named editor of New York's Smart Set. He also wrote several books of art criticism. Then, after a bout of drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, Wright literally reinvented himself. Under the pseudonym, S.S. Van Dine, he wrote a series of mysteries about a sophisticated, even effete Manhattan sleuth, modeled on himself, Philo Vance, who was featured in 27 motion pictures."

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Gerald Nordland, Catalogue Essay: RICHARD DIEBENKORN (1922-1993), 2000, 1984, 1971, 1969, 1960s

Ocean Park; Works on Paper

     "Richard Diebenkorn* entered into the Ocean Park Series in the late nineteen sixties while he was teaching at U.C.L.A., living in Santa Monica Canyon and had his studio in the "Ocean Park"section of that city. . . .

     "Diebenkorn* was recognized early in his career as the leading West Coast abstract expressionist painter as he began to show in private galleries and was invited to show in national and international museum exhibitions. He met regularly with David Park (1911-1960) and Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991)to discuss recent work, and to draw from hired models. In those weekly sessions he listened to Park and Bischoff discuss their figurative work and he was tempted to experiment with a landscape or still life to see if he would feel the same enthusiasm in realistic painting problems. He wanted his work to be more inclusive, but he had to keep his painting conceptions intact. He painted a cityscape and made a few still lifes which he found exhilarating, and moved ahead in eager anticipation, still uncertain whether he would continue in this vein. He was intrigued by the effect that human figures had on the mood and flavor of painting. As he worked at the new figurative paintings he was receiving recognition, awards, gallery success, exhibition invitations, museum retrospectives, based on his abstract work. He was invited to tour the U.S.S.R. to give slide talks to Members of the Soviet Artist's Union. In Leningrad, he was privileged to see the Shchukin Collection of Matisse's, which reinforced his admiration for that master.

     "While teaching at U.C.L.A. his stop gap studio in the Ocean Park area, had no daylight and was not suitable for painting, so for nearly a year he focused on figure drawing, producing many of the most impressive works of his career in drawing media. As soon as Diebenkorn* moved into a day lighted studio, he turned to painting large canvasses in still life, interiors and single figure images, which were singularly masterful, grandly conceived compositions. But suddenly, to his surprise, he found himself making abstract paintings. In 1969 he said of this evolution:

     ""It's been a great release for me to be able to follow the painting in terms of just what I want for the painting, as opposed to the qualifying that I found I had to do in figure painting. I'm not the kind of painter or colorist...who can paint pink flesh blue and make it stick. I could never do that. If I painted skin blue, well, I could try it, but I would have to change it...[In my figure painting] I would start out with brave, bold color and a kind of spatiality that came through in terms of the color. Then I would find gradually I'd have to be knocking down this stuff that I liked in order to make it right with this figure, this environment, this representation. It was a kind of compromise that on one hand can be marvelous, and what painting seems all about; and on the other hand becomes inhibiting restraint. "(1)

     "The Ocean Park canvases were generally vertical works measuring around 90 inches in height and 72 in width within the painting reach and physical grasp of a large man. Those measurements happened to be about as large as could be safely angled through his studio door and down the steep stairway for transport. The canvases tended to be developed on a newly devised grid of vertical and horizontal areas of abutting color, with underlying drawing and occasional defining diagonals. The color areas were richly brush formed, sensuous to the eye, the hues strong and singing but often enhanced by areas of neutral or more delicate color which could evoke suggestions of atmosphere or landscape. His painting process was based on many thin layers of semi transparent color and adjusted drawing which slowly coalesced into an inimitable paint body. One reads linear demarcations, underpainting, remains of revised compositional divisions, residues of scrapings and pentimental build ups, which have found their proper balance in completed works. Some of the early Ocean Park paintings suggest landscape or biomorphic subjects, others are clearly architectonic structures. His painting process itself did not change with his shifts, away from and back to abstraction, but remained similar: he never looked for a specific result, approached each work afresh, resisted formula, preferring to plunge the whole composition into chaos rather than repeat himself. The most distinctive Ocean Park images present an original pure abstract painting esthetic which is complex, flat, and shifting, but mysteriously related to the principles of his lifelong masters&endash;Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian.

     "Diebenkorn* did not make preparatory drawings for his large structured Ocean Park paintings. He began them with a process of getting acquainted with the scale and shape of the support and the rhythms that seemed to conform to the particular proportions. At some point he began to take the effort seriously and proceeded to develop the emerging visual ideas with his accumulated experience and skepticism. Henri Matisse once wrote, "A large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium." (2) Diebenkorn's* drawings were developed in a parallel but separate fashion in the same creative struggle. Both reflect light and space through an integration of elements, line, surface, monochrome or color, illusion and radiance, which are intuitively converted into a syntax of his own invention, evolved from his lifelong examination of historic and modern art.

     "Large canvases pose different problems than do comparatively small sheets of paper. Diebenkorn* had strong feelings about the difference:

     ""My reasons for doing 'drawings' (many of them are fully developed paintings) are roughly twofold. [My drawings] often begin as sketchy explorations of ideas, which then hook me into further and then complete development. This activity, up to the point where it becomes for me a serious work, is related to my larger oil on canvas pieces and is a kind of a tryout or rehearsal of general possibilities. It ceases to be this, however, at the point of becoming an independent work. The other reason, which somehow in no sense excludes the first, is my need to do relatively small works, independant of others and complete in themselves. But a small canvas usually becomes for me an unfeasible miniature. Paper, however, I find is something else, lending itself to the different scale of the small size. It is almost as though if I can call my work a large drawing instead of a small canvas it becomes possible." (3)

     "The small but elegant selection of Ocean Park works in this exhibition have been gathered from 1971-1984 the kernel of what is now recognized as the artist's most distinctive period as a world class painter, draughtsman and printmaker. The Ocean Park "drawings", or "paintings on paper", were improvised directly on their specific sheets, as were the large paintings on their canvas support. Due to the scale of the works on paper, the artist's working methods could be immediate in that he did not need to move back to an appropriate viewing distance before making decisions concerning adjustments. At arms' distance, graphite and charcoal could be erased or corrected flexibly, and he could amplify or reiterate an imprecise line, an interrupted surface, a contradiction of spatiality. Unsatisfying relationships between colors were more difficult, but problems of drying time could be largely ignored.

     " . . . "

Gerald Nordland, Chicago, August 2000

Gerald Nordland directed museums in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Milwaukee. He is the author of Richard Diebenkorn* published by Rizzoli, 1987.

(1)"New Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn," by Gail R. Scott. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June-July 1969, p. 6.

(2) Henri Matisse quote from Matisse on Art , Jack D. Flam [ed.], N.Y.: Phaidon, 1973, p.73.

(3)Drawings 1974-84, by Frank Gettings. Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1984, p. 254.

(4) Richard Diebenkorn*, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., November 1980, p. 23.

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Rivera/Roberts Correspondence, 2000, 1994

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Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.

37. Bay Street Craftsman Cluster, circa 1900
137, 141, 145 & 147 Bay Street
Designation: 5 December 2000

     "This historic district contains four structures, all two story, front gabled, multi-family residences. Architectural unity and physical connection are reinforced by the palm tree-lined Bay Street.

     "These buildings are among the earliest intact examples of Craftsman style apartment buildings in the Ocean Park District. They were strategically located at Neilson Way, originally the Los Angeles Pacific Railway right of way, which connected Santa Monica to the rest of the region, and were also close to the beach and the Main Street commercial district."

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 D. J. Waldie Our New Jerusalems: Recent Terrains: Terraforming The American West. Photographs By Laurie Brown, Poetry By Martha Ronk, Essay By Charles E. Little; Johns Hopkins University Press: 98 pp., Paper, Los Angeles Times Book Review 24 December 2000, Foreward

     "Recent Terrains, a new collection of landscape photographs by Laurie Brown, opens with a dreamlike black and white panorama of a low hill above a dark, rutted plain. The sunstruck crown of the hill is crenelated with a curving wall of houses that seems both arrogant and defensive. Just below, the freshly landscaped slope descends like the fortification of a city ready for war. It would be a hard

fight and hand-to-hand among the whirring sprinklers for an army to take this high ground. . . .

      "Sacred Ilium," I think, another town where the price of an ordinary life was loyalty to an imperfect place. These houses on a man-made hill in Orange County are a suburb of doomed Troy. Like the other houses in Brown's stoically ambiguous photographs from the suburban fringe, they recall how the story of Troy ends. Every city ultimately disappoints, Homer knew, and therefore is to be cherished while you can.

      "Recent Terrains is the collaborative work of a photographer, a poet and an essayist, and they have mixed reactions to what Homer knew. Martha Ronk, at the end of Arroyo Seco (the first of three poems that head the sections of Brown's photographs), can't decide:

 

. . . after a while, I couldn't tell if

nostalgia was

for a place or a time or before learning

to think.

 

     "Until, in Peripheral Views, the middle poem, she considers that the ultimate state of grace might be one in which all of us are absent:

 

Before the streets laid out in grids,

before groves of oranges

and avocados, the horizon stared into

space as wind grew hotter

and light whiter and time slowed to

ripening vine.

 

     "There's no place so timeless and no room to be nostalgic in the deeply textured photographs of freshly graded hillsides and cul-de-sacs under construction that are the substance of Recent Terrains. Presented as panoramas, Brown's photographs aren't vistas in the romantic tradition of American nature photography. She generally brings our attention to the confused middle ground in each photograph, where some abstract moment of place-making has just been arrested.

 

     "Over that disturbed ground, caught between man-made and unmade, hang two contentious views about the landscape of California. The first is that its unbuilt places invite your and my presence, but only to be acolytes of its unspoiled divinity. The second is that the empty land actually requires our presence, to build cities on it and a temporary home for civility. However opposite, these views contain something in common, namely the wholly American idea of improvement.

 

     "Improvement works both ways. The wild is almost as much improved by my regard, thought John Muir, as I am ennobled by its effects on me; and I am, thought Walt Whitman, as improved by my labor in building a house as the wasteland is on which I build it. This is our national contradiction, that American landscapes are better when they are left free and when they are built up. It is the irresolvable core of what it means to make one's place in America.

 

     "The three sequences of Brown's photographs of new subdivisions make this point emphatically. They also reveal all the uncertainties in photographing American scenes that Charles E. Little's terminal essay collapses into unsurprising certainties.

 

Photography, as the first modern art form (that is, the

first to give the accuracy of science greater weight than

the indeterminacy of aesthetics), had promised hard

evidence, but it delivered more conjecture. "This is the way

things are," a photograph insists, but we know by now that

it's only the way something was, and only for an instant and

in one preferred direction, without reference to what was

off to one side and without much connection to the instants

before or any that followed.

 

Photography also is the most romantic of art forms, claiming

an epiphany for both the photographer and the viewer with

each mechanical click of the camera's shutter but only

revealing that instant's true emotion later, after competing

and unarresting images of the same scene are weeded out.

Then, the pictures are shuffled in time (as Brown's are),

their edges cropped to fit and their colors abstracted to

black and white until one is tempted to see a "just so"

story in them.

 

     "Little's concluding essay succumbs lyrically to the temptation. The poetry of Californian regret always evokes a time of libidinal adolescence acted out against a backdrop of Arcadian beauty (as if the glorious orange groves grew without migrant labor or rigid segregation). In his few hundred words, Little joy-rides among the orange trees with police pursuing, takes a clandestine plunge in a film star's pool, pulls sweet fruit from the careless abundance of a neighbor's yard and engineers a first tryst on the beach. How can ordinary suburban houses, "perched," he writes, "on the terraformed landscapes of despair," stand against so much militant nostalgia?

 

     "Brown's answer is subtle. Her photographs do not appeal to elegiac memory and even less to unspoiled nature. She shows landscapes caught in a transitional moment of their improvement, so that graded house lots on one page are equivalent on the next to the trampled ground left by the herds of sheep that once processed these hills and by the Spanish and Mexican cattle that preceded the sheep and by the Native Americans, whose cultivation of the "wild" oak trees by fire and cutting came first.

 

     "That a landscape with houses and without them has some equivalent properties turns up in Ronk's final poem, Site of Staring, by recalling the timeless, watchful horizon without us, except now

 

The houses whiten on the hillside

as suns written into years unborn. . . .

 

     "All cities are like Troy in their potential to mingle tragedy and the commonplace, Homer knew. Brown reaches toward that knowledge without flinching or sentiment. Though ambivalent as her photographs must be, she shows us towns

being made that may claim someone's allegiance, answer their longing and persist in memory. Homer knew such places were as sacred as they were vulnerable-New Jerusalems turning into Troys."

 

• "D.J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. He, lives in Lakewood, where he is a city official."

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