Diebenkorn’s Fine Line
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

American painting in the second half of the 20th century owes more to the Marines than it admits.
While Robert Motherwell was sitting out World War II in Mexico, musing grandly on the Spanish Civil War, Richard Diebenkorn (1922-93) enlisted in the Marine reserves at Camp Pendleton. Uncertain of a career path, he knew only that he liked to draw. At Quantico (where he flunked Officer Candidates School), a sympathetic sergeant kept him supplied with art materials. He went to work in cartography; he was preparing for airborne reconnaissance over Japanese positions when the war ended.
That training yielded the distinctive aerial perspective and rectlinear landscape structure of his brilliant “Ocean Park” series of abstract paintings, begun in the late 1960s and continued for 20 years. His path to the “Ocean Park” series and beyond is on full display at the Katonah Museum, in what is the first retrospective of his prints.
The exhibition features more than 100 works, including series rarely exhibited in their entirety. Though he is more widely known as a painter than a printmaker, Diebenkorn’s prints are as distinguished as his paintings. An attraction toward various intaglio printing methods dates to the early days of his career: Diebenkorn made his first prints in 1948 and worked at printmaking on and off for the next 30 years. Beginning in the late 1970s, he immersed himself in sustained print projects, spending part of every year in the printing workshop.
Many of Diebenkorn’s prints offer themselves as paintings by another means. The imposing aquatint “Green” (1986) required seven plates and the assistance of five printers. The woodblock “Ochre” (1983) was produced in concert with an expert ukiyo-e printer and carver. In each, color exerts its weight in luminous, textured overlays and painterly detail, dispelling any lingering thought of printmaking as a step-child to painting.
One of the advantages of this exhibition is its emphasis on line, an austerity that lends steel to the lyricism of Diebenkorn’s color sense. Line provided counter to expressionist gestures – what Diebenkorn termed “that fifties morass.” It sustains the structure of his paintings and his hundreds of works on paper, and in the prints it is enhanced by the nitric acid bite and the irrefutability of scrapers, burins, and that drypoint burr.
Prints have the advantage of being embraceable. While the monumental sizes of Diebenkorn’s paintings hold the viewer at a necessary distance, even the largest of the color prints can be observed intimately. You can follow the rhythm of its parts – the puddling of the colors, the wandering smudges and chance effects of the printing process – without losing sight of the whole.
Starr Figura, curator of this exhibition, is from the department of prints and illustrated books at MoMA. She selected samples of every technique Diebenkorn used: lithography, woodcut, and all varieties of intaglio, including spitbite and soapground. Her catalog essay is a thoroughly useful, non-rhetorical guide through different processes and Diebenkorn’s work with them. She keeps her focus on the skilled labor – almost always collaborative – that undergirds the making of so much plangent beauty.
A finished print is rarely the work of a single hand and, by definition, it yields multiple originals. This denies prints the status that accrues to unique objects. But status is not an aesthetic category. And collaboration undertaken in a spirit of love for the perfection of the work leaves an indelible mark.
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In a small side gallery is “Print making: Process Revealed,” a supporting exhibition aimed at illustrating the printing techniques used by Richard Diebenkorn. An appealing accompaniment to the main event, it includes work by other artists – among them, Janet Fish and Charles Cajori – who worked in the same print studios as Diebenkorn.