Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Through Jan. 15

“If Jackson Pollock was the darling of abstract expressionism in New York during its heyday, then Richard Diebenkorn was the face of the movement in California,” said Elizabeth Bair in the Dallas Observer. Diebenkorn began his career as a representational painter in the vein of Edward Hopper but achieved acclaim for his early abstractions before undertaking more figural work. In 1966 he settled in the rundown Ocean Park section of Santa Monica, Calif., and the shift in locale inspired another shift in approach. Diebenkorn set to work on what would become his most popular series of paintings—more than 140 works of geometric abstraction, spanning 25 years. The “Ocean Park” series, painted “mostly in aquatic blues and greens,” took its colors from Diebenkorn’s new surroundings.

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If only the 75 paintings in this show had gone on display in the summer, said Gaile Robinson in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “The watery aquas, misty grays, and brilliant blues” of Diebenkorn’s canvases are “as refreshing as iced lemonade”: They “seem to wash over you and leave a mist of ocean spray.” While the geometric angles hint of street corners and façades, Diebenkorn dismissed as too limiting the idea that they are merely abstracted landscapes. Equally compelling both up close and from across the room, the large canvases bear evidence of the artist’s mastery of technique. He meticulously worked and reworked the surfaces, often intentionally revealing “ghostly shadows of colors past.” As the show ends, the startling appearance of reds marks another geographic shift: the artist’s late-career move to Northern California. Still, this is a deeply harmonious show. The time to see it is “on an unseasonably warm day, just for the thrill of the visual chil