The Decisive Line of a Master

By ROBERT HUGHES

The idea of mastery has taken a beating in American art circles in the 1980s. Scorned by deconstructivists as the mask of elitism, downgraded by critics who ought to know better, misused ad nauseam by the art dealers' industry, and rare as the phoenix anyway -- Who wants it? And yet, who doesn't? Sometimes you come across a contemporary exhibition for which there is no other word, and the show of drawings by Richard Diebenkorn at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is one.

For mastery does not mean a talent frozen in its own fancy high-mindedness, a rhetorical grandeur. It means the kind of range, flexibility and intelligence of response that enables an artist to pass on his culture -- his sense of past art and what it means -- to the present, refracting it through his own experiences without nostalgia or loss. Mastery does not kid itself in distinguishing between a real relation to tradition and one based on expediency. It does not mean facility. (Cezanne had it, in the teeth of exhausting struggles with the motifs that show at every point in his work. Matisse had it, while making things look easier, at least on the surface.) It is not present in raw talent. It rises from deep continuities, not sudden facile ruptures. There are a few living American artists who have it. One thinks of Robert Motherwell's collages, for instance. And in drawing, especially, of Diebenkorn.

Diebenkorn, 66, has spent nearly all his working life in California; but the time is long past when he was regarded in New York as a California artist, with the slight condescension that implies. He is, quite simply, one of the best painters America has ever produced. He began as an abstract painter, making organic, landscape-like images in an idiom related to abstract expressionism; one of his inspirations, though in the end an adversary one, ! was Clyfford Still, a colleague at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the late '40s. Then in 1956 he turned to representational painting, believing that his work could only develop out of a closer contact with the world's body. The grand synthesis of the two came after 1970, with his Ocean Park paintings.

But every stage of his painting is based on drawing to an unusually full degree. Drawing is the essence of his work, the process that makes his pictorial thought possible. It defines the forms, sets up the changes of pace between areas abutting across a surface, provides the evidence of change and reconsideration that the calm look of his finished paintings only partly hides. "If ((drawing)) does not insist on its importance," writes the show's curator, John Elderfield, in his catalog essay -- as acute and satisfying a text as any critic in recent memory has written on drawing -- "it is because its importance is that of mortar between bricks, barely noticeable at times but what holds the structure together and keeps it firm."

Not the least remarkable quality of Diebenkorn's graphic work is the formal constancy that runs below its variations of subject and diction. You detect its exterior sign in a steadiness of mood. There are not many emotional ups and downs in Diebenkorn's work, although he certainly does not feign his calm. He finds the world too enjoyable to be detached from it. Life in Southern California (and a durably happy marriage, now in its 46th year) has had the same kind of stabilizing effect on Diebenkorn that the Cote d'Azur did on his great mentor, the subject of his most impassioned reflections, Matisse. This is apparent in Diebenkorn's figurative drawings of the '60s, and transparently clear in the Ocean Park abstractions from landscape that absorbed him from 1970 through to his move from beachside Santa Monica to Sonoma County earlier this year.

In the figure drawings nothing is sentimental or overwrought. Naked or dressed, their model -- commonly his wife Phyllis -- inscribes herself on one's view without ceremony. Her poses seem fallen into, not directed, as natural and unaffected as could be. But what holds one's eye is the resolution Diebenkorn finds in the architecture of the body: the way a transverse arm cuts across the gourdlike shape of hips, the thrust of a shin redefining the space around it, the clear slicing of light into dark and profile into void. Diebenkorn's line learned its decisiveness in front of the model. It is clear and energetic, but less meaningfully so, in the earlier landscape abstractions. Some of these are beautiful drawings, but they are made-up images; they do not have the same stubborn pertinence to visual truth that the life drawings do, with their cutting line and their insistence that no part of the paper, marked or not, is really empty.

Diebenkorn sees drawing as a chain of events in which none of the links are hidden and every image carries the record of its own making, false starts and fresh turns included. It isn't so much a matter of spontaneity as of truth to the record. Painting covers the traces, drawing exposes them. So it is, especially, with the Ocean Parks, whose preliminary drawings in gouache and collage go right to the edge of being paintings in their own right; it is just that in a work like Untitled (Ocean Park), 1984, you see more of the process of formation, the pentimenti, the unfolding of thought than you do in the oils. For by now, everything Diebenkorn found worth keeping in his past seems available to his perceptions in the present. This is known as artistic maturity. It is an inspiring sight, and Diebenkorn's drawing is its continuous medium.