ARTS
Exhibitions 1
Unresolved issue
Giles Auty
Richard Diebenkorn (Whitechapel Gallery, till 1 December) Jenny Franklin (Crane Gallery, till 16 November) Luke Elwes (Rebecca Hossack Gallery 2, till 1 Novem-
Endless debates on the pros and cons of abstraction and figuration, often into the early hours of the morning, formed part of the stuff of my early professional life. Today such arguments proceed, if at all, largely in lay circles. An assumption exists in the art world that some kind of filial wis- Across the abstract/figurative divide: `Woman in Profile, 1958, oil on canvas, by Richard Diebenkom dom has been established on this and vari- ous other artistic issues. Indeed, if items such as rows of old filing cabinets opened to reveal snippets of damp carpet are art, as many seem to believe now, then abstract painting comes to look almost indecently aesthetic by comparison.
Going to the Whitechapel to see the large-scale exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn's paintings cannot but prompt nostalgic musings for the good old abstract/figurative divide. Dozens of moon- ing art students milled about at the time of my visit, looking as lost and confused as such folk habitually do these days. The new, received wisdoms of the art world do not seem to have aided the clarity of mind of our younger artists. Rather, they look cowed. They — and their teachers — form gallery-going herds of herbivores, schooled to crop the cud of contemporary culture without complaint. One never sees a sharp- toothed animal, let alone a tiger, among them.
Diebenkorn himself alternated twice between figuration and abstraction, sug- gesting the two modes offered him simple alternatives rather than a source of poten- tial artistic schizophrenia. Diebenkorn was born in 1922 and occupies a status described didactically if none too logically by Catherine Lampert, director of the Whitechapel, in the catalogue foreword to the exhibition: 'Although in the United States he is regarded as an unquestioned master, in Europe, without any work on view to be judged, Diebenkorn's special status is somewhat mythic and far under- estimated.' Since the work was largely unknown here until now, how on earth can it be underestimated by us? Ms Lampert is merely expressing the prevailing orthodoxy. The real value of the show, brought here generously by American sponsors Skid- more, Owens & Merrill and others, is in giving us the chance to judge for ourselves.
A number of artists with whom 1 have talked feel already that the reputation which preceded Diebenkorn was, if any- thing, excessive based on the current evi- dence. What makes me uneasy about him is hard to define. If I had to settle for one description to apply to his art it might well be self-conscious. I sense the artist was too conscious always of pressure from his peers in the world of modernist academic life in America. In short I remain unconvinced that he produced, other than occasionally, what were absolutely and essentially his own pictures. Accordingly a work like 'Cor- ner of the Studio — Sink', 1963, seems to me at once more personal — and thus suc- cessful — than much of the rest. Hopper, Bonnard and Matisse seem obvious influ- ences on the way Diebenkorn painted at different junctures. They influenced how he painted but not always what he painted.
This is why I enjoyed works such as the sink painting and 'View from the Porch', 1959, especially. The artist's truly distinc- tive, personal style arrived later in his `Ocean Park' series which stretched from the late Sixties to 1988. These works are also the most formal and non-figurative on view. They are distillations of pictorial tastefulness, which last has seldom been a noted attribute of American art. Perhaps this explains the breathless approval they have received from the American museum world, their growing solipsism notwith- standing. The artist received the National Medal of Art from George Bush last July, perhaps for his final achievement in arriv- ing at perfect, if somewhat bloodless muse- um art. Diebenkorn's great abstract machines are often masterpieces of pictori- al balance — I think here of 'Ocean Park 16' especially — yet remain unsatisfying withal. They are muted, architectonic hymns to studio virtues rather than to human life. Thus they are ideal fare for America's new secular replacements for cathedrals: her museums of modern art. While fallibility and a certain clumsiness typified Diebenkorn's early figurative painting, his more recent, large abstrac- tions have floated off into the ether leaving evidence of earthly struggle below them. By contrast with unresolved earlier landscapes such as 'Ingleside' of 1963, the later abstract works look wonderfully accom- plished. Freed from engagement with the specific, the task of the artist becomes an easier, though much less satisfying one.
Two current exhibitions by younger artists, Jenny Franklin and Luke Elwes, point to similar issues. Both are eclectic borrowers of symbols from other cultures which they fit into semi-abstracted struc- tures. The resulting pictorial mélanges are often colourful and appealing. Franklin, at Crane Gallery (171A Sloane Street, SWI), is prolific in output and organises shape, space and colour with skill. The danger which lurks in her lush Eden of feeling and memory is loss of pictorial tension resulting from absence of any enforced structure. Her paintings may be, but do not look, bat- tled out in the way abstract painters who were friends in my youth understood the expression.• It may be typical of my gender to want pictorial tautness and focus. If painting were cooking, which a good deal of it is, tautness comes from clever balance in the seasoning. As they work, artists taste what is in the pot continually. It is the best ones who know what and when to add to lift even the plainest ingredients.
The paintings of Luke Elwes at Rebecca Hossack's recently opened second gallery beneath the vicarage at St James's in Pic- cadilly (entrance in Church Place which runs through to Jermyn Street) deal in sim- ilar propositions. They are more angular but no less poetic than those of Franklin. Elwes uses simple geometry to impose order on his piercing colour combinations and chaos of symbols. Yet, as the work of Diebenkorn illustrates so clearly, excessive reliance on rectilinear structure may lead only to another pictorial cul-de-sac.
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