Richard Diebenkorn1992
Ocean Park
by Jack Flam
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....