After all, some of their closest friends were lawyers.
Unfortunately, as far back as I can remember, my parents, parents friends, relatives, teachers and other concerned adults had been patting me on the head and saying:
"John, you can be anything you want."
I say unfortunately, because nobody had ever given me this encouragement, and then added "just don't be an artist. "This created, in my second year of college, what I am going to call the Diebenkorn problem. I wanted to enter a profession that my family associated with poverty, alcoholism, scraggly beards, chain-smoking, and permanent financial dependence.
The Diebenkorn problem began to take shape as early as Freshman year, when I discovered that I had left my tennis racket at home when I packed for college. Since I couldn't enroll in tennis -- everyone has to have at least one easy class Freshman year, right? -- I enrolled in a painting class. I had been drawing cartoon characters since the age of six, and although I had taken no art in High School, I figured I could doodle my way through a painting class.
Of course, the Diebenkorn problem, like any addiction, got serious fast. By the end of my first semester of art classes I was painting on the walls of my dorm room -- a bad copy of a Paul Klee -- and reading art magazines until midnight in the library. I was peppering my speech with French and German and even Italian words: "Fauvist", "kitsch", "quatrocento."
The Klee-style Mural on the Author's Dorm Wall, 1975
Dangerous stuff.
Even more dangerous was the appearance of a mentor in my life: Professor Nate Oliveira, a painter. As soon as I met him, Nate had a magnetic pull on me. Here was a man who loved what he did, who had real compassion for people, and who was a member of America’s upper-middle-class. You see, I really was trying to follow my family's script, just with a new twist.
I really felt that I could become a man like Nathan, a painter and a teacher, but to really shoot the moon, it became clear to me that maybe I could even go a bit further than that.
I could be like Dick Diebenkorn.
Everyone in the Painting Lab admired the artist's hazy blue "Ocean Park"paintings, which were gaining a national reputation for their open, gestural brushwork. Art collector "Hunk" Anderson, who had hired me as in intern and tour guide for his growing collection, had purchased a Diebenkorn "Ocean Park", on Oliveira's advice in the mid 70's, and also owned several earlier figurative Diebenkorns. I used to stand in front of the vast, airy Ocean Park painting at the Saga Food Offices where the Anderson collection was shown. It still had dozens of brush hairs trapped in it's surface, and I remember thinking that was very cool. I also liked that the artist's recent paintings were numbered, not titled.
Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park No.114
Diebenkorn was a friend of Nathan's, and by prying, I was able to discern the man's mythic status. Dick Diebenkorn drove a Porsche. He had been a Professor at UCLA, but quit since he didn't want to do committee work (Yikes!) Diebenkorn was annually producing something like a dozen large Ocean Park paintings which were sold as they were produced to a waiting list of collectors who paid $100,000.00 for a painting.
Diebenkorn was an artist who made other, successful artists, jealous. He was just way more successful than any other living painter, at least in California.
He was also known as a rather square, tallish, WASPY sort of guy. Gosh, so was I. When I say Diebenkorn was "square", he was the only artist I knew of that used rulers to draw lines on his canvasses. THAT is square.
I didn't think sensible thoughts like "Maybe the man is just immensely talented, and that's why he is doing so well, and maybe I have no talent." I simply set my sights, and declared an Art major. The way I saw it, the rest of my life would just become a movie titled "Becoming Dick Diebenkorn."
When I mentioned Diebenkorn around my family, it turned out that they knew something about the man, but from a slightly different angle. Turns out my Aunt Alice had attended Stanford after the war (yes, it's the family school) and Phyllis Gilman, later Phyllis Diebenkorn, had been a member of her class. My aunt was very familiar with the story of how poor Phyllis married an artist, and everybody felt sorry for her since she had no future at all.
Some things never change.
Then, at my grandmother's house, I ran into Esther Slinger. Esther, it turns out, was Phyllis Diebenkorn's aunt, and she told me her most salacious story:
"I once visited Dick and Phyllis when they were living in Berkeley, and I saw him painting. He actually THREW the paint at the canvas."
Here she was, kindly old woman, trying to scare me into respectability, but her comment backfired and shifted my view of square as toast Dick Diebenkorn a skosh closer to Jackson Pollock. Cool: I could drive a Porsche, throw paint, wear Brooks Brothers shirts and even be slightly dangerous. My Diebenkorn problem was now an obsession.
I was going to have to meet the man.
In October of 1977 a "Diebenkorn Retropsective" opened at the Oakland Museum, and I studied the show up and down. In fact, I wrote about art for the very first time in my life, and got my review published in the "Stanford Daily." It sounds pretty whiny when I read now, 25 years later:
"Formula-painting seems the real subject of the 'Ocean Park" series. Every one of these large paintings, to a large or small degree, recalls a beauty which Diebenkorn's compulsive personal sensibility has distilled from the landscape."
I think it was the review that finally got Nate's attention. One day during class he signaled me away from the other students into a dark corner of the painting studio, as if he was ready to sell me some drugs. He slipped me a slip of paper torn from a yellow lined pad, and told me:
"Give Dick a call. He is expecting to hear from you."
I still have that slip of paper. In fact, here it is:
This was an incredible moment. It was as if I had been invited to join a secret society of artists. Meeting Dick Diebenkorn was going to be like joining the "Skull and Bones" society.
A few weeks later I pulled up at the curb of a house which sat on a winding road leading out of Santa Monica Canyon. Yes, there was a Porsche in the driveway, but that is a given for Pacific Palisades. The house was unassuming in front, and a couple of very ordinary dogs were barking at the front gate.
Richard Diebenkorn: Photo by Dan Hofstadter
The man who answered the door was stooped and somehow totally familiar. Writer Dan Hofstadter describes him well in his book "Temperments":
"He has something of the appearance of a leading man in an old-fashioned drawing room comedy: the sculptural planarity, the dark emphatic eyebrows and mustache -- deep clefts running like parentheses from cheeks to chin -- clefts that behave like dimples and help to give him his genial, kindly appearance."
As I walked in, a real stunned fish as visitors go, I couldn't really pay any attention to Mr. Diebenkorn, since the walls had my full attention. On the living room wall, a long, horizontal Diebenkorn canvas of a tea set on a tablecloth stolen from Matisse. There were lots of small drawings from India, a charcoal nude by Los Angeles artist Bill Brice.
The house, which was L-shaped, had a stunning view across a patio with potted orange trees into Santa Monica Canyon. Each view was like a painting itself. I felt that I must be in the South of France. Mrs. Diebenkorn was warm and accommodating, and obviously had made her life around managing her husband's comforts. I couldn't help but notice their calm connection with each other.
As we sat down to begin our visit, I brought out a portfolio of my own drawings. Not surprisingly, they were drawings done with a bamboo pen, much influenced by a book of - -you guessed it -- Diebenkorn drawings that I had purchased at the Stanford Bookstore.
This seemed a decisive moment: I was showing Dick Diebenkorn my work.
His response? I think its fair to say that he was pleasantly underwhelmed. He made a few gentle comments about my use of line, and the whole portfolio was set aside in ten minutes.
What do I remember about the next hour or two? Tea served with lemon -- in glasses cups stolen from a Matisse -- a dining room filled with charcoal drawings, afternoon light cutting new shadows on the big still-life in the living room.
Diebenkorn talked at length about his admiration for the work of James Doolin, a painter in the graduate program at UCLA. This painter, he said, was working on an aerial view of Santa Monica Mall. The painting, apparently huge, was complex, fascinating, and painterly: a masterpiece in the making.
Years later, when I met Doolin, and was able to view this painting, now in the Oakland Museum, he was touched when I told him what Diebenkorn had said.
Our visit came to an end just after the artist opened a catalog of paintings by Mark Rothko. He was leafing through them and commenting, somehow testing to see if I might have anything interesting to say. He opened a page in the front of the section and showed me an early Rothko and asked:
"Whose work does that remind you of?"
I had no idea.
Our visit was over.
It's not as if the man kicked me out of his house for not knowing that Mark Rothko had an early period where he took ideas from John Marin (figured that out in the library the following week), but I did sense that maybe he was disappointed. The man liked to talk about painting, and I was just a student. I was feeling pretty phony.
As he walked me to the front door, he said:
"Give me a call sometime if you want to visit the studio."
To this day, I cannot give any rational explanation as to why I never called him back and visited the studio. I kick myself now.
I did go back a few years later, when I helped a friend publish a Diebenkorn poster. He claimed to remember me, and fiddled with a box of pens to find just the right one to sign a few posters. The house looked the same. The Diebenkorns had a settled life.
By the time I had my graduate degree in Painting, it was 1982, the art world was coming to a boil, and new artists were making headlines. Clemente, Schnabel, Basquiat -- young, splashy, challenging talents - -made the work of artists like Diebenkorn seem suddenly ancient. I continued to admire his work, but after meeting the man, it was a little like a spell was broken, and I went through phases of admiring, copying and stealing ideas from at least a dozen other artists, living and dead.
When I worked for the notorious art dealer Larry Gagosian in 1983, I was only half an hour from the Diebenkorn's house, but it seemed worlds away. One day Larry, and his buddy, film producer Keith Barish spilled out of Larry's office laughing hysterically, like ten year-olds on a laughing jag.
"John", Larry said to me, "Keith and I have a riddle for you: what kind of collectors buy Diebenkorns?"
I shrugged.
Larry gave the punchline: "Rich Jews."
The pair laughed all the way out to Barish's blue Bentley. How could Barish, a Jew himself, and the Producer of "Sophie's Choice" possibly find the joke funny. To this day I still don't understand. I don't know if Barish was laughing because he was trying to buy one, or because he was making sure NOT to buy one. Cynicism can be confusing.
It’s true that by the end of the 80's, owning an "Ocean Park"painting was a label of liberal success. I saw one at the home of Norman Lear, the producer of "All in the Family." I recently saw a photo of Jane Ganz Cooney, the visionary behind "Sesame Street" in front of her Diebenkorn. If those are the "Rich Jews" that Gagosian was referring to, he chose the wrong people to slam.
I suppose it dates me to confess to the world "I once wanted to be Dick Diebenkorn."
The lesson of meeting the man, was that he was indeed what I wanted to become: a man who had the time in life to know his mind, and the warmth and class to share with a student who admired him. Suddenly, in the post September 11th world, Diebenkorn's worlds of calm reflection in art and domestic warmth at home look almost impossibly attractive.
In the end, I really had made a very wise choice of a role model, even if my motivations at the time were pretty shallow. These days, I drive a Nissan Truck, not a Porsche, and there is no waiting list for my paintings, so I didn't exactly become the next Diebenkorn.
I should warn you though: if you ask to visit me at home, I am going to offer you tea with lemon and want to look at art catalogs with you.
Originally written for artsiteguide.com February, 2002
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