Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

George Bellows was not a great artist. He was, for a brief period, a very good artist, an accomplished painter of difficult, turbulent, turn-of-the-century New York City, a daring stylist who repeatedly found subjects that matched his free paint-handling and swift brush. Thereafter, he was often an interesting illustrator who painted lifeless canvases best forgotten. [Image: George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.]

Both Bellowses are in evidence in curator Charles Brock’s thick National Gallery of Art retrospective, the third devoted to the artist since 1979. It is on view through October 8. The exhibition is, if anything, too faithful to the range of Bellows’ output, preferring encyclopedic breadth to focused examination. The result is a kind of twinbill: Four-and-a-half densely installed galleries of very good Bellowses: boxers, boy-bathers, the celebration of the urban and the proletariat, followed by a roughly equal number of galleries of wince-worthy regression featuring maudlin landscapes, saccharine pictures of the wealthy at play, lifeless portraits, war propaganda and, finally, a late Bellows boxing picture so inert that it mostly reminds us how much better the early boxing paintings were. But perhaps any Bellows retrospective must be a mixed bag.

George Bellows, athletic son of a well-to-do Ohio builder, arrived in New York City in 1904 as a  22-year-old illustrator, a starting-point that Brock smartly makes clear in the exhibition’s first gallery, which includes five drawings and four paintings. Occasionally these early New York paintings look like Bellows doing someone else: Kids, a 1906 picture of children playing around a city stoop, could be a blown-up Daumier. Several 1907 portraits in the show’s second gallery, including Little Girl in White, are Bellows doing Robert Henri, an instructor to whom Bellows gravitated once he arrived in New York.

Bellows finds his first great subject in 1906 and in 1907, when he started making paintings of naked boys cavorting around bodies of water. Begun just two years after his arrival East, these pictures show that Bellows had already discovered what he did best: Paintings of action, the busier the better, composed with a sharp, focusing triangle, loose brushstrokes and occasionally provocative presentations. Of Bellows’s Forty-two Kids (1907, collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, above left), at least 13 are bending in two or otherwise presenting their hindquarters to the viewer or another kid. At least half a dozen others are presented in a state of presentation or male adjustment. (Readers interested in a sophisticated historicization of Bellows’s several paintings of boys and later drawings of men should see Jonathan Katz’s excellent 2010 essay “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” in the catalogue for the National Portrait Gallery exhibition of the same title.)

At 25, Bellows would begin the series for which he is best known: His three 1907-1909 paintings of boxers, canvases popularized in the ensuing years by Bellows’ own lithographs. These are among the finest American paintings of the half-century. The three here are characterized by free brushstrokes that seem to match the movements and pace of the fighters. They seem all the greater today, when ultimate fighting is ascendant and boxing is in decline: Bellows’s boxers, one of whom has his leg raised, apparently for leverage, is more UFC than IBF. [Image: Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909. Collection of the National Gallery of Art.]

These paintings seem to have encouraged Bellows to continue to free up his brush even more. Over the next few years he would make the paintings in Brock’s next gallery: Views of New York City life, of the excavation of what would become Penn Station, of riverside promenades on stormy days and so on. The boxing paintings seem to have helped Bellows understand what a Bellows painting was: a painting of urban life that relies more on the movement of the brush across the canvas than on composition, a painting with dramatic transitions between light and dark and an emphasis on workers, on the underclass that made the city tick, grow and throb. (Like other illustrators who painted, including Hopper or Homer, Bellows could get lost on a canvas.) Most of these elements are on splended view in Rain on the River, a 1908 painting (below, left) composed from two triangles, one light, one dark, and brushy atmospherics.

And then the Armory Show. For decades art historians have noted that the 1913 exhibition has marked a break in Bellows’s work, and it’s hard to imagine the before-and-after split presented more starkly than here: Midway through the exhibition Brock has hung three of Bellows’s early society pictures opposite pictures of dock workers, snow movers and tenement life in the city. The pictures of urban grit are commanding, harshly brushy in all the best ways. In pictures from 1911 and 1912 it seems as though Bellows has finally, after eight years in New York, figured out how to effectively compose a picture without using a triangular form. Docks in Winter (1911) shows labor in the cold, with abrasive snow or sleet pounding down. As birds scurry for cover, two workers and their team of horses do work that apparently must be done. The painting is simultaneously cold and sympathetic. Nearby, a loaded-brush semi-abstraction titled Gorge and Sea (1911) offers a landscape guided by brushy touch rather than by tangible terra firma, Bellows adding not just oily texture but an apparently increased understanding that tone was more important to his work than was bright color. The artist seems to have not just figure out what made a Bellows a Bellows, but how to build on what he’d done.

Then just as quickly, it all vanished. The post-Armory paintings are confused muddles of ill-defined figures and facial features, ill-conceived compositions (Bellows has given up the triangle for the leading diagonal) and confusing color. Among the later paintings, only Riverfront No. 1 (1914), a revisiting of an earlier theme, succeeds.

Post-Armory landscapes are messy, full of colors that seem off by several shades. Portraiture subjects seem to be holding his or her breath, stiffly, as if they were afraid that if you poked them they’d deflate. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Bellows’s better mid-career portraits — such as Geraldine Lee, No. 2 (1914) – are almost Henris.) The exhibition’s catalogue features several essays that nibble at the edges of how the Armory Show may have affected Bellows for the worse, but never really tackles the question head-on. It is a missed opportunity in an otherwise thorough publication. [Image: Bellows, Lillian, 1916.]

Even as Bellows’ painting declines precipitously, he continues to make strong illustrations. Brock spotlights many of them in a gallery that provides visitors with an opportunity to compare and contrast the dynamism of Bellows’ work on paper with the increasing stasis of his paintings. A series of drawings of football players for captures the brutality of the early gridiron game, a period during which football was so violent that 19 players were fatally injured in a single year and even President Teddy Roosevelt urged that it be banned.  Drawings of the evangelical preacher Billy Sunday are full of life and energy, zest which dissolves in a flat, lifeless painting. Brock smartly hangs the painting between a related drawing and a lithograph, allowing us to see how Bellows’ inability to resolve the larger painted composition and make color work within it cause the canvas to seem comparatively lifeless.

The exhibition’s nadir is a gallery with four of Bellows’s awful paintings about World War I, paintings so bad that catalogue essayist Carol Troyen doesn’t bother trying to defend them. They are full of cartoonish, imagined scenes of dismemberment and cruelty. (Bellows never served in the military and neither saw nor experienced the Great War.) Troyen dismisses these paintings as an “ambitious yet problematic attempt to marry propaganda with the grand manner,” which is both correct and a measure kinder than they deserve. [Image: Bellows, Football, 1916. Collection of the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College.]

In fact, that gallery is so bad that it raises questions about the necessity of this, the third Bellows retrospective in the last 34 years: There is nothing new here, no elevation of the unknown or little studied, no tight focus. Instead, it is merely an exercise in ossification that confirms the Bellows of decades-held understanding. In his catalogue essay, Brock quotes historian Daniel Catton Rich writing about Bellows in 1946: “Why, with such remarkable gifts, did Bellows slowly unmistakably surrender a number of them and become a self-conscious stylist?” Sixty-five years later, that’s still a good question. Ultimately, given the NGA’s recent history as a museum intensely devoted to exhibiting the work of white American men – with one semi-exception, the NGA has not originated a solo exhibition of a female artist in nearly 20 years – why is it re-visiting well-trod ground?

The exhibition’s final painting, more or less, is Dempsey and Firpo (1924, collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art), one of Bellows’s three late boxing pictures. This one features a well-coiffed Dempsey laying Firpo out of the ring and into the first row of the crowd. At this point Bellows seems to have given himself over to being an illustrator: The dynamic movement of the first boxing series is gone, as is the loose, free, exciting paint-handling. (Indeed, the 1923 drawing for the painting  has much more verve and detail than does the canvas.) In Dempsey and Firpo, it seems as if each figure in the painting is holding a pose – and has been for quite some time. For this exhibition, it is a fitting final work.

The best way to experience Doug Aitken’s SONG1, the video spectacle projected around the entire Gordon Bunshaft-designed Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from sunset to midnight each evening through May 13, is to walk around it. I’ve watched SONG1 from the Calder, from the Koons, the Munoz, the (terrific) Snelson and from behind the Oldenburg. I’ve watched it with a couple dozen people from across Independence Avenue and across Seventh Street. I’ve stood inside Bunshaft’s hollow hockey puck and watched other people watching SONG1. Experiencing the perimeter of the Hirshhorn and the sculpture around it in a new way at a new time (at night!) is a lot of fun.

But the mini-thrill of spectacle  is where the joy ends: The Hirshhorn staging of Aitken’s SONG1 is a major presentation of a minor artwork. Aitken’s achievement here is technical: He uses eleven HD projectors to blanket darn close to every inch of the Bunshaft’s exterior with light. The bottom of the film lines up with the bottom of the rounded section of the building. The top lines up with the top. Speakers pipe sound into a broad area around the museum. In terms of the technical achievement, it’s thoroughly wow-level.

However, the content of the artwork itself is inert, even dull. SONG1 is little more than a slick music video for the 1934 jazz-and-pop standard “I Only Have Eyes For You.” It turns out that once given some of the nation’s most prominent real estate, Aitken had little to say. (The museum itself seems somewhat aware of this: Promotional material for the artwork on the Hirshhorn’s website focuses on technical achievement.)

SONG1 traffics in seemingly every small-screen cliche available: Dramatically-lit man lights snaps his fingers to the beat of a song. An old-fashion reel-to-reel tape player rolls. (Instant nostalgia!) Clips of dancers doing their thing against dramatic lighting are juxtaposed with video of a freeway at night. Here, as so often in SONG1, the first thought is of a short-form television genre, in this case a soda commercial.

In a perverse way, it’s impressive that Aitken could fall into virtually every trap that a commission such as this offers: Rely on scale rather than ideas? Check. Aitken is often content to rely upon tired metaphors such as lit matches = fires of passion! or attractive young people driving at night = moody! Use familiar faces instead of conceptual heft to get an artwork over? Check. SONG1 features abundant cameos of hipster-loved semi-stars as Tilda Swinton and Devendra Banhart, and the audio that accompanies the visual was recorded by dozens of singers, including Beck, No Age and Lucky Dragons.

That’s too bad, because while Aitken is inconsistent, he has demonstrated the ability to meld accessible spectacle with thoughtfulness. His migration (2008), which debuted as a projection at the 2008 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, is a smart, entertaining consideration of the consequences of the expansion of humans into animal habitat and the impact of our lifestyles on nature. Or it’s a children’s story. Or an updating of Henri Rousseau. Or all of it. None of that is here.

While SONG1 is a dud, the Hirshhorn deserves credit for swinging for the fences. (See, I can do it too!) Using the facade of its chilly Bunshaft is a good idea, one that that Hirshhorn has tried in less ambitious ways in the past. (The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,  Jim Hodges and Krzysztof Wodiczko has been installed on the Independence Ave.-facing part of the building’s exterior.)

Better yet, SONG1 gives Washingtonians hope that the Hirshhorn is back. In recent years the museum has degenerated into one of the least interesting, least productive of America’s major contemporary art museums. It hasn’t produced a major, scholarship-contributing exhibition since 2010. The permanent collection galleries often look tired, like dusty afterthoughts. (Example: A particularly weird, ongoing permanent collection installation is built around the simplistic idea that some art the museum owns is black.) SONG1 may fall flat, but here’s hoping it’s a sign that the Hirshhorn is coming back to life.

Related: All three images here are via Flickr user joevare, who has the best set of Creative Commons-accessible SONG1 images I’ve seen. Aitken’s studio has posted excerpts of SONG1 on YouTube.

Walking into Doug Wheeler’s new “infinity environment” at Chelsea’s David Zwirner gallery is like walking into a cloud of milk. Nothing in the installation is visible, concrete or certain. It is suggestion and experience as art: A suggestion of a physical space on which the viewer is completely unable to focus and an experience of a day-like cycle of light, 32 minutes during which Wheeler uses an array of instruments to play Helios, to create and deliver sunrise, high noon, sunset, inky nighttime and then sunrise again.

The installation, titled SA MI 75 DZ NY 12, is on view at Zwirner through Saturday. Lines to see the installation have rarely been shorter than an hour long. (Art in America’s Brian Boucher recently wrote about waiting four  hours to see it.)

An ‘infinity environment’ — the phrase seems to be Wheeler’s, but on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast he said he’s no longer sure it’s a good one — is a space that Wheeler has altered to eliminate any corners or places where light has an opportunity to sit uncontrolled by the artist. It’s hard to tell, but I think the Zwirner space is a rectangular room that opens into a blob-shaped room that may or may not be symmetrical. Just above and to the sides of the entrance to the apparently blob-shaped room, Wheeler has installed the (apparently) timed lighting devices that create the sensation — facsimile? — of one day’s light.

This is Wheeler’s fourth ‘infinity environment.’ According to Zwirner, Wheeler made the first one in 1975 at Milan’s Salvatore Ala Gallery. That piece was acquired by Italian businessman Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and is now in the Guggenheim’s collection. Eight years later he made another for an installation for a 1983 exhibition at MOCA, and in 2000 Wheeler installed his largest ‘infinity environment’ at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

I entered Wheeler’s space — where the visitor is standing in the JPEG at right — at about ‘mid-morning.’ The ‘day’ was still becoming bright. As I stared straight ahead, I saw pinks and purples. When I moved my head, I continued to see those colors. Every time I blinked, I saw a black dot near the center of my vision.

After some time, I’m not sure how long, the installation became brighter. I could feel my iris contracting my pupil in response to the increasing intensity of the light. As the installation became brighter still, I thought I could see a tree in shadow in front of me, its leaves waving in the breeze and then a bird taking off. None of this was really there (right?), it was just the intensity and perhaps the heat of the light playing tricks on my eyes.

Brighter. I realized I was squinting. A moment later I was squinting so hard that my eyes were tearing. Within a few minutes I discovered that the brightness of the light was giving me a shattering headache. I realized how disorienting Wheeler’s environment is: I had lost all knowledge of time, of how long I’d been in the environment. I had no sense of up, down, left or right. If I’d turned around, 180 degrees, I could have instantly sited myself. Unless, unsure of my bearings, I had fallen down while turning. (At about this point I remembered that in 1980 someone fell down in a James Turrell environment at the Whitney, was injured, and later sued the museum.)

After a few minutes I could feel my pupils beginning to expand again. The brightest part of “the day” had passed, “nightfall” lay ahead. As the brightness receded, I thought I might recapture a sense of space, of grounding, of tangibility, but I did not. I remained inside the installation throughout the darkness. I saw yellows and peaches each time I blinked. Soon the dark gave way to the child of  morning, a dawn less rosy-fingered than it was a tangible sensation of light melting onto my corneas. When the brightest part of the day returned, just after I’d been in the environment for a full cycle, I stepped out. Upon sitting down with my notebook a couple of minutes later, the first thing I wrote was: “One of the greatest experiences ever. Feel privileged to have been in it.”

These ‘infinity environments’ are quintessential light-and-space masterpieces. They make us aware of light, unaware of space and unsure our sixth sense, perception. It seems like they should be the conclusion of the light-and-space experiment: They seem informed by or at least in conversation with Robert Irwin’s tendency to make us unsure of the space around us, Larry Bell’s ability to make us unsure if what we’re looking at is real and tangible or not, and James Turrell’s experiments with color. They’re controlling in a way similar to Eric Orr’s installations such as Zero Mass (1972-73), which requires the viewer to walk into a paper-made womb-like structure and to allow her eyes to adjust to the low light level.  (I read and hear that Maria Nordmans operate in a similar way, but I’ve never been in one. Nordman declined to be included in various Pacific Standard Time-related exhibitions because she does not participate in group exhibitions.) Instead the ‘infinity environments’ seem to open up the possibility of greater artistic control over space, light and perception, possibilities later explored by artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Anthony McCall and Erwin Redl.

One of my tests for the greatness of art is whether it rewards a sustained gaze, whether it gives me new reasons to spend time with it, whether I find new joys with continued viewing. Wheeler’s newest ‘infinity environment’ passes those tests in an unusual way: It rewards our gaze by transforming looking into a physical experience.

Related: Doug Wheeler is this week’s guest on The Modern Art Notes Podcast. My understanding is that it’s just his third one-on-one interview. Click here to download the mp3, here to subscribe to the program via iTunes and here to subscribe via RSS.

On the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s acquisition of a major Wheeler in 2008, Wheeler and I sat down for his first-ever interview. Here’s the introduction, part one, part two, part three and part four.

[All images in this post: Doug Wheeler, SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 1975/2012. Reinforced fiberglass, LED lights, high intensity fluorescent lights, UV fluorescent lights, quartz halogen lights, DMX control. Architecturally modified space, composed of two parts. 564 x 702 inches (total space) 1432.6 x 1783.1 cm. By  Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.]

It turns out that light-and-space, the mostly made-in-California art of the post-abstract expressionism era, was misnamed. A survey of the work, on view now at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and titled “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface,” suggests that the movement should probably be known as ‘light-space-and-effect’ or ‘light-space-and-perception.’

The show, which reveals the depth and wow-factor of the ocular confusion created by artists out of light, space, often a range of plastics and sometimes a few other materials too, is a thrilling triumph. The show so striking that it’s hard to believe that in the 40-plus years since light-and-space emerged that no museum has previously surveyed the period. “Phenomenal” establishes that light-and-space isn’t a quirky side-alley of minimalism or anything else. It’s one of the 20th-century’s most important independent art movements.

However, “Phenomenal” also leaves plenty of curatorial and art historical work to be done: It doesn’t aspire to chronicle the complete arc of light-and-space, instead “Phenomenal” is a greatest hits-style survey. Given the amount of square-footage required by many light-and-space works, this was probably MCASD’s best option. Questions about how light-and-space emerged and then developed are left to two books: The excellent exhibition catalogue and “Pacific Standard Time,” a Getty publication that details the story of art in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980. (And, hopefully, to future exhibitions.)

The scholars who contributed to each volume tend to agree that light-and-space had its origins in painting, particularly in experiments begun in the late 1950s by Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, each of whom would abandon canvas to become light-and-spacers. (In her catalogue essay, exhibition co-curator Robin Clark notes that many of these early works have since been destroyed. Separately, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has convincingly referenced the paintings of John McLaughlin as a key precedent.) The research Clark, Dawna Schuld, Stephanie Hanor and Michael Auping contribute to the catalogue highlights painting, 1950s architecture and craft as important to the development of light-and-space, effectively serving as a rejoinder to historians and critics who have presented it as a response to New York minimalism.

But really, that light-and-space art has origins substantially independent of New York minimalism shouldn’t be a surprise: The two ‘movements’ have little  in common. At the heart of minimalism was a rigorous and intense belief in the object: Donald Judd was fascinated by seriality, classical mathematics and machined perfection. Carl Andre’s subject was the re-contextualization of sculpture, which necessitated dealing with — and even standing on — an object. Anne Truitt insisted that her sculptures be placed directly on the gallery floor, so a viewer could experience the object in relationship to the body. In nearly every gallery of “Phenomenal” it’s clear that objecthood is less important than — and often eliminated in favor of — perception-challenging effect.

The widespread (but hardly unanimous) light-and-space preference for phenomenon over objecthood is ultimately ironic considering the amount of space the exhibition takes up, and indeed requires. MCASD has installed “Phenomenal” in all three of its venues: Two sites in downtown San Diego and one in suburban La Jolla, a 20-minute drive north. The three sites could not be more different: Downtown, MCASD occupies a former train station baggage depot and the bottom couple floors of an office building. In La Jolla its home is a 1916 Irving Gill-designed residence that was re-designed by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in 1996. No matter: Despite enormous differences in venues, each presentation is thoughtful and as detail-oriented as installations of light-and-space art require. (More on this in a minute.)

For example, the Irwins and Craig Kauffmans installed at the museum’s non-train-station downtown location are installed without artificial light. Typically museums install Irwin discs spotlit from below and with resulting shadows projected on a wall behind them. The absence of artificial light leaves Irwin’s disc — and an Irwin painting installed nearby — hovering in the milky evanescence. This installation is more than aesthetic fetishness, it’s a specific argument about the development of light-and-space, about how one of the key achievements of the movement was the dematerialization of the object, a preference for experience or phenomenon over objecthood. Irwin’s unlighted disc seems to nearly vanish, underscoring the artist’s own journey from a painter to a maker of environments in which the object dissolves.

The rest of the exhibition seems to proceed from this installation of Irwin’s untitled 1969 disc: Kauffman’s plastic constructions, both hanging from above and wall-mounted, shimmer in the natural light. (In a conventionally lit gallery they tend to reflect direct light, which lessens their impact.) An Irwin scrim piece, which extends for at least a dozen yards across one gallery, seems to hide in plain sight. When I realized it was there, I felt as if it had, well, snuck up on me, a phenomenal special effect.

Across the street at the former Santa Fe depot baggage building, an untitled, mirrored Bell sculpture from ca. 1970 left me unsure if I was looking at it or through it, to whatever lay beyond. Only when I saw myself reflected in the parts of the surface that were mirrored was my brain able to resolve the riddle. DW 68 VEN MCASD 11 (1968/2011), a giant Wheeler environment in a warehouse-sized room, is sumptuously installed. I felt like I was walking into a giant, white Mark Rothko painting, or like I was approaching some kind of northern heaven. Like the Bell, the Wheeler and many other works in “Phenomenal,” James Turrell’s Stuck Red (1970) and Stuck Blue (1970) tweaks the modernist obsession with flatness and depth or perspective by creating immersive installations in which the viewer doesn’t see the tension between flatness and perspective, but rather experiences it. Throughout the exhibition I kept feeling my eyes zoom in on an object and zoom back out, trying to settle on or solve what was in front of me.

At MCASD’s La Jolla venue, a fuller range of these effects are on display. Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970), a 40-foot-long, foot-wide corridor lit with fluorescent green requires a viewer to shimmy through it in order to realize its wow: When a visitor emerges from the piece, the cones in his eyes are so scarred that the world looks magenta. (Knight discussed the piece on The Modern Art Notes Podcast here.) May 5, 1971 (1971), an installation of six cast polyester resin bars by Peter Alexander, seems to hover off the wall on which its installed, to vibrate in place, confusing my eyes and brain with optical effect in a manner reminiscent of the Turrells downtown. De Wain Valentine’s Diamond Column (1978) seems traditionally totemic, but it’s visually slippery and seems to change depending on from where it is viewed.

Part of the reason these works shine is the sensitive, intelligent installation organized by Clark and her co-curator, MCASD director Hugh Davies. Light-and-space art relies upon how it is placed in galleries and lit (or not) in order to produce the effects desired by the artists. If Clark and Davies missed on a single installation, I couldn’t find it. I suspect that one reason the exhibition looks so good is that many of the works are from MCASD’s own best-in-the-world collection of light-and-space art. The museum has installed many of these pieces before, has worked with these artists before and has acquired significant institutional knowledge about how to do it.

“Phenomenal” doesn’t have a specific ‘final gallery,’ but the space in which Irwin’s masterpiece 1° 2° 3° 4° (1997) comes closest. The piece is a site specific installation Irwin created for an MCASD La Jolla room that looks over the beach, some palm trees and the Pacific Ocean. It consists of an empty gallery and apertures cut into the corners of the three huge windows that create the space. The cut-outs, two of which are placed in the corners of the gallery and one of which is in the middle of the center window, radically change the viewer’s sense of space, depth and place. I’ve seen the work before and I returned to it half a dozen times during my visit to the exhibition. Each time my brain realized what my eyes were looking at, how Irwin had changed the space inside and out and melded them into one, my stomach fell to the floor as if I was on a roller-coaster. Light-and-space-and-effect indeed.

In 1966 Richard Diebenkorn left the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’d been making some of the most thoughtful, rich, figurative and representational paintings in art, to teach at UCLA. The next year he moved into a new studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica and started making new paintings, paintings that were radically flat and abstract. Diebenkorn would continue to work in this manner for 20 years. These works are the subject of an exhibition “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. The show was co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art.

OCMA curator Sarah C. Bancroft has included about 80 works, not just paintings but also drawings, paintings-on-paper and prints made between 1967 and 1987, when Diebenkorn worked at the intersection of Main Street and Ashland Avenue in what is now downtown Santa Monica. While Diebenkorn didn’t necessarily embrace the term ‘Ocean Park series,’ he didn’t resist the moniker too strenuously. (In part because studio and space had a significant impact on his output, Diebenkorn’s abstractions had long been semi-titled under the geography of their making, such as ‘Berkeley,’ ‘Albuquerque,’ or ‘Sausalito.’) Bancroft’s exceptional exhibition confirms our idea of Diebenkorn as the greatest painter of his period, the second-generation abex-and-forward era, and suggests that the Ocean Park paintings are the pinnacle of modern abstract art. [Image: Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #116, 1979. Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.]

The MAMFW installation opens with a  small gouache, charcoal and ink on paper, Untitled (View from Studio, Ocean Park) from 1969. As Bancroft explains in a catalogue essay, the little sketch is a three-part view. The middle features the view from Diebenkorn’s studio window: A couple of palm trees, a telephone pole, some houses and possibly fog. The top third of the painting is filled by the open transom window in his studio, the bottom-third by the window’s opaque lower panel. It’s easy to see where Diebenkorn took inspiration for at least some of the geometry that inspired the paintings that were to follow for the next two decades. (The catalogue includes a somewhat representational 1970 painting Diebenkorn made that seems to feature the same studio window.)

Still, however fascinating they are art historically, neither of these paintings are quite what we consider ‘classic’ Ocean Park paintings. They’re too divided, broken up into thirds, and are plainly transitional. While Diebenkorn’s move to Santa Monica created the same opportunity to re-invent his art that a new studio typically provided for him, the key transitional moment in Diebenkorn’s work seems to have come several years after he moved into Ocean Park. In 1970 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation invited Diebenkorn to make art informed by massive engineering projects in Arizona known as water reclamation. Diebenkorn accepted the invitation and viewed the bureau’s earthworks, such as the Central Arizona Project Aqueduct, from both mesa-top and from helicopter. That experience directly led to Diebenkorn’s acrylic-on-paper series, Lower Colorado #1-#8 (1970). [Image: Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #27, 1970. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum.]

Five of these eight paintings were first exhibited in an art museum at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2010. I wrote that they showed “Diebenkorn approaching the peak of his powers, mixing color in geometry in ways that would soon lead to the best of his Ocean Park paintings.” In her catalogue essay Bancroft agrees, and includes aerial photographs of the Central Arizona Project that approximate what Diebenkorn might have seen from the bureau’s helicopter.

These eight works on paper were a pivotal point in Diebenkorn’s career. Before the Bureau of Reclamation project, the Ocean Park paintings were often sometimes stilted rectangles in which disparate colored spaces were held at bay by wide swaths of white, a painter’s equivalent of a two-by-four. They were nice sections pushed together, but not quite completely resolved whole compositions. After the Reclamation pictures, the two-by-fours became longer, canvas-spanning, narrow pipes of white, or were eliminated altogether. Suddenly — with four paintings from 1970 the exhibition makes clear how quickly this change happened — the paintings came together as they had not before.

The only disappointment of Bancroft’s exceptional exhibition is that these eight Lower Colorado pieces are not included. Instead they’re relegated to a two-page spread in the catalogue. (Another highlight of the catalogue is Susan Landauer’s feisty essay, which suggests that there is much scholarship and study left to be done on Diebenkorn, his sources, and the context in which we might consider his art — and that Landauer believes that Jane Livingston, the curator of the last Diebenkorn retrospective and of the ongoing Diebenkorn catalogue raisonne project, got a lot wrong.)

The Bureau of Reclamation paintings, acrylic on paper with occasional collage, are important in another, slightly paradoxical way: They reveal how important landscape was to Diebenkorn and, well, how unimportant it was. (In general, landscape as a source of Diebenkorn’s art has often been overstated by historians.) Yes, landscape — particularly Reclamation’s man-altered landscape of the desert Southwest — was critical to the maturation of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park work. In addition to how that trip seems to have helped Diebenkorn to smooth the composition of his paintings, it seems to have informed his palette: Before Reclamation his Ocean Park paintings were full of ruddy reds and a range of pastel tones. Afterward, his color took on greater brightness and intensity. Landscape informed, but it did not motivate. Diebenkorn seems to have carried what he saw in the desert Southwest with him into his Ocean Park studio, where he mixed it with other influences, including that transom window, his own masterful understanding of color, and his own study of Matisse, Cezanne, Hofmann, Bonnard and more. [Image: Diebenkorn, Lower Colorado #5, 1970. Collection of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.]

And what a run it was: For 18 years, from 1970 until the end of the Ocean Park series in 1988 (when Diebenkorn moved to Healdsburg, Calif.) Diebenkorn made paintings, works on paper and prints that consistently reached the apex of 20th-century abstraction.

That’s not to say that Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series is better than Jackson Pollock’s drips or Barnett Newman’s zips or Clyfford Still’s knifed canyons or Vija Celmins’s star-fields or spider webs. But ‘Ocean Park’ is the body of work that most absorbs and considers virtually every key innovation of 20th-century painting. Maybe a better way to put it is this: I can’t think of a series that is as informed by — and effectively sums up — 20th-century abstraction as fully as the Ocean Park series. And still the paintings never feel like they’re doing that — they’re Diebenkorns through and through. You’d never mistake them for the work of anyone else. In this last great burst of his life, Diebenkorn synthesized decades of painterly progress and then found a way to make it all his. [Image: Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #87, 1975.]

True, when it comes to examining the modernist project in painting Diebenkorn had an advantage: His Ocean Park production hit its stride nearer to Nixon than to the Third Republic, 65 years after fauvism and cubism began aggressively flattening space, 50 years after neoplasticism began carving up that flatness and 30 years after abstract expressionism first dominated art in both New York and San Francisco (where Diebenkorn himself was a leading protagonist in the 1940s). Another advantage: Diebenkorn’s commitment to California geographically isolated him from the way so many New York artists were chasing the newest dominant -ism in their bid to escape abex. Pop and New York minimalism had little-to-no impact on Diebenkorn. (In fact, it’s hard to think of a major American artist less impressed by pop.)

Instead of pursuing the present trend, Diebenkorn doubled-down on his examination of the previous 70 years of painting. In the Ocean Parks, as in cubism or fauvism, space is completely flat. Even when Diebenkorn paints a curving diagonal, there is no suggestion of depth or perspective, just line. The composition covers the entire field; Diebenkorn uses every last centimeter of canvas and expands the focal point to include the entire surface of the painting.

And Diebenkorn succeeds in areas where his fellow 20th-century titans failed, such as scalability. There are few Picassos that are both large and great. There are few, if any, small Pollacks as great as his big paintings, such as this giant, almost nine-by-eighteen-foot painting. It doesn’t matter how big or small Diebenkorn’s Ocean Parks are, they still shine. The little cigar-box-lid paintings, which Diebenkorn often gave to friends as gifts, max out at about eight inches square. The color, line, composition and intensity is as powerful at sixty-four square inches as it is in concurrent paintings, which clock in at 8,100 square inches. In the history of art, there are very few painters who made small as well as they made big. There’s Rembrandt, Raphael, Bonnard, Matisse, Diebenkorn — and not too many more.

This scale-up, scale-down was enabled by Diebenkorn’s mastery of composition. Part of the genius of the Ocean Parks is that with this series Diebenkorn hit upon a way to reduce painting to his two greatest strengths: color and composition, or line. Every Ocean Park, down to the smallest drawing, is architectonic. The carefully considered, erased, and re-painted horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines support the colors that sit on and over them. The colors seem to provide structure for, well, the structure. Architecture is a major interest of artists today, of sculptors such as Sarah Oppenheimer and of painters such as Julie Mehretu and Terry Winters. There’s no direct line between Diebenkorn and those artists — or to the artists of the southern California light-and-space movement, who were also interested in architecture — but one of the revelations of this exhibition is how much the construction of Diebenkorn’s late work is likely to have influenced the next generation of artists. [Image: Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1975.]

Certainly there’s no way to take them on directly, pictorially. These are remarkably finished paintings, declarative sentences and lack the sort of open-ends from which other artists most like to pick up. Walking through the MAMFW show I tried to find parts of canvases that were compositionally unresolved, where line broke down, where color was a bit off or a tick out of place. Couldn’t find it. Ultimately, I suspect that if Bancroft had chosen 30 different Ocean Park paintings, the exhibition would have been just as great. There may not be an imperfect post-1970 Ocean Park painting.

Which brings me to the final greatness of these paintings: They’re just astonishingly beautiful. Each Ocean Park artwork is clearly a part of a single, extended exploration, a project, but each stands on its own, too.

Weirdly, one of the triumphs of Bancroft’s exhibition is that by hanging so many Ocean Park works together we have the opportunity to discover how unalike they are: Some are dominated not by washy, foggy grounds, but by the color black, with only faint traces of color. Some are rich studies of blue and green slotted into geometries and compositions that are seem comfortable and easy, but whose pentimenti reveals them as hard-won. Others are dominated by burnt yellows and reds. Another by a not-quite-monochrome blue, broken up by thin diagonals that are mostly white, with perhaps a bit of yellow, and then a dominating just-as-thin line of red at the bottom of the canvas. Many are horizontal, especially from the late ’70s forward. There is even purple. (Purple? Purple.) [Image: Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #138, 1985.]

In the end, I do not know how to explain that for me Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings are simply the most beautiful abstractions of the century. After all, “most beautiful” is a wincingly subjective determination.

Or is it? In a recent lecture at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, the painter’s daughter, said that during the Ocean Park period her father was fascinated by the golden ratio, an irrational mathematical constant long believed to be aesthetically pleasing and she suggested that it informed his painting during the Ocean Park period. Maybe Richard Diebenkorn simply found the way to combine color with a storied, magic formula, and thus found a way to paint the greatest abstractions in modern art.