Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park Paintings - Softcover

Flam, Jack

9780847817276: Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park Paintings

Softcover

ISBN 10: 084781727X ISBN 13: 9780847817276

Publisher: Rizzoli, 1993

Richard Diebenkorn, The Ocean Park Paintings critically reexamines the celebrated West Coast painter's most compelling achievement. Jack Flam, Distinguished Professor of Art History at the City University of New York, carefully assesses many aspects of Diebenkorn's eminent career - the struggle between realism and abstraction, the discretionary bounds of the actual versus the literal, the synthesis of seen versus felt experience.
Professor Flam, a preeminent Matisse scholar, particularly illuminates the historical sources of the Ocean Park paintings in regard to their relation to the original ambitions of modernism. In a career whose apparent contradictory nature has often placed this brilliantly dexterous painter at odds with any art establishment, Diebenkorn has profoundly persevered. The Ocean Park paintings - an ongoing series begun in 1967 - is the body of work most responsible for transforming Diebenkorn from a local painter of both abstract and representational renown into a prominent American artist of international prestige, whose work successfully embodies figurative and abstract principles.

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From Publishers Weekly:

West coast artist Diebenkorn, widely regarded as a modern master, moved between representative and abstract styles before sealing his reputation with the ongoing series of abstract "Ocean Park" paintings treated in this volume. Thirteen works from this series--named for the Santa Monica, Calif., district to which Diebenkorn moved his studio in 1967--are reproduced here in rich color, one to a page. Flam, professor of art history at the City College of New York and a Matisse specialist, contributes a sensitive essay. Eschewing for the most part comparisons between Diebenkorn's work and that of his contemporaries, Flam focuses on Matisse's influence on the Ocean Park paintings, manifest in the tension between the two-dimensional rectilinear geometries of their form and their deeper intimations of landscapes and urban window views. The muted colors and weathered textures of these works suggest the industrial, coastal urban landscape; Flam appropriately stresses the importance of their title city to them, both as an inspiration and as an emblem: "ocean, park" representing the extremes of nature, the boundless and the delimited.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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