Like Cézanne, Richard Diebenkorn could generate a dynamic whole from a writhing mass of restless revisions. What comes across in one superlative canvas after another at the Grey Art Gallery’s display of his breakthrough phase as an abstract expressionist is that research made manifest was his mode for keeping paint surfaces alive. Even where local details seem provisional, the overall effect is crystalline.

“Diebenkorn in New Mexico” is the first show to focus exclusively on the fecund 30 months the young West Coast artist spent in Albuquerque between 1950 and 1952. Technically, this is student work, as Diebenkorn was enrolled at the University of New Mexico in a master’s program, but the circumstances were unusual. A graduate of Stanford who had also studied at Berkeley, Diebenkorn was already an exhibiting artist and an instructor at the California School of Fine Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) when he took up his rights under the GI Bill and headed to New Mexico. He had found it frustrating that his students in San Francisco had more time and materials than he did himself. In Albuquerque he was treated as a special case, and left to his own devices in a private studio.

Vacillation was a hallmark of Diebenkorn not just in individual works, with their pentimenti, awkwardness, and jerky improvisations, but also in the arc of his career. Fearless of prevailing fashions, he famously yo-yoed between abstraction and representation. He turned back to realism and the figure in the mid-1950s during the height of abstract painting. Then, in the late 1960s, in Los Angeles, when abstraction was long out of favor, he initiated his late style of spare, cool, geometric abstraction with his Ocean Park series, where tentative lines and distressed surfaces again signified painterly probity.

The effect of isolating one phase of his development as an abstract painter in this exhibition is, in a way, to package Diebenkorn
as an artist with a conventionally unified style. The installation eschews any attempt to describe development within this short period, presenting the group as a formal whole. He comes across as a highly accomplished, distinct voice within Abstract Expressionism. And yet, although every work bears his strong, personal mark — omnipresent throughout his oeuvre — even in this tightly focused group of paintings there is a significant lack of a signature effect or device comparable, say, to Jackson Pollock’s drips or Mark Rothko’s wobbly lozenges. What characterizes Diebenkorn’s work is, instead, a complex of traits that seem to be the by-product of investigations rather than their intended end result.

The work comes across as exuberantly provisional and radically scruffy. There is a sense that what we see is nonchalantly cropped, that forms continue beyond the picture’s edge. Deibenkorn favored an earthy palette that often seemed closely hewed to the raw canvas itself. He was weaning himself off an early attraction to stark contrasts of black and white — inspired in part by the example of Willem de Kooning paintings seen in reproduction — and often there is a black linear element that looks like handwriting on top of patches or fields of muted color. In “Untitled (Albuquerque)” (1951), for instance, black lines from a dry brush provide a kind of linear commentary to a planar composition, accenting, and accentuating, otherwise loosely demarcated areas of color. A block of brown, for example, contains in black calligraphy an open loop, a number 9, and an A that form an improvised ideogram; an X marks the edge of a shape of oranges and reds against a nebulous area of pinks.

The dry brush is a frequent signifier in these paintings of quick, nervous, anxious, tentative mark-making, recalling someone too desperate to write something down to load his pen with ink. This gives agitated gestural presence to the works. It is not just the linear element that exposes this trait. In “Untitled (Albuquerque)” (1951), strokes of paint taper into dried-out ends. Throughout his career, Diebenkorn often favored thin, economical layers of paint, in contrast to his peers and mentors. At the California School, he was torn between the competing influences of Clifford Still and David Park, both of whom were famed for their extravagant use of impasto. Aside from the fact that, early on, the artist was indeed hard up and determined to remain prolific, thin paint suited his aesthetic temperament. “Untitled” (1950–52) uses thin washes with different colors and tones spied one behind another to build up deep, receding space without allowing the layering to retard the sense of immediacy ensured by washy, drippy paint application. Layering of translucent washes also exposes an archaeology of how an image comes into being, serving color in a way that is comparable to what pentimenti do for line. This sense of becoming, of the image being found in the process of its own making, was crucial to Abstract Expressionism.

Within the unified mini-corpus of Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque years, there is rich diversity of paint qualities, especially in the works on paper. In an untitled 1951 watercolor, for instance, from a private collection in Sante Fe, little forms seem to float within an aqueous area in light blue to the right, in contrast to speckled, almost gravelly passages to its left. In “Untitled (Albuquerque)” (1952), in the Buck Collection from Laguna Beach, Calif., great swathes of yellow and orange seep into the canvas in a way that anticipates by six years the staining strategies of the “post painterly” Color Field painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. The restless experimentation also provokes very different ideas, from work to work, about line: Sometimes it acts contrapuntally to color; other times it defines shape, or enjoys complete autonomy. Diebenkorn’s adventures with line also extended to a gnarled, expressively awkward sculpture in welded scrap iron.

Much is made by the curators of this exhibition, which originated at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, N.M., of the impact of the light and terrain of New Mexico on Diebenkorn’s palette, with its ochres and tans, and perhaps by extension in the sense of forms being blown about by the desert winds. These are insights backed up by the artist’s own pronouncements, although much of this vocabulary was in place in canvases made in San Francisco before he headed south, and remained consistent back in Berkeley and in Urbana, Ill., through the mid–1950s. But there is no question that a sense of place is implicit in his nervously shifting forms and tentative coloration. More than his forays back into figuration or his loyalty to California, it is this attachment to specific experiences of environment that set Diebenkorn apart from his New York School peers. But the quality and intensity of this singular exhibition determine that he was, indeed, their peer.

Until April 5 (100 Washington Square East, 212-998-6780).