Excerpted From Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes - February 21, 2008

So on Saturday afternoon I found myself at the Phillips Collection, which had just installed a show of recent acquisitions that might as well have been subtitled, “While you’re here, perhaps you can explain to us what in the name of Duncan Arthur Phillips three Elizabeth Murrays are doing here?!” when I bumped into an old friend, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 38.

I love the Ocean Park seris. As far as I’m concerned it’s the apex of American abstract painting, a notch above Mark Rothko’s color clouds and several notches above anything else. (Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, you’re next.) Selecting my favorite Ocean Park painting seems mostly to be a function of which one I’ve seen most recently: FAMSF’s, SFMOMA’s, Hunk & Moo Anderson’s (recently on view in San Jose, Calif.), MoMA’s and of course, maybe the Phillips’.

One of the reasons these are such great paintings is that there are umpteen ways to approach them. What are those lines there for? Is there anything specific Diebenkorn has abstracted to get to this painting? To what is he referring with that diagonal or that color ? And as I find myself thinking about these things, I feel like I’m standing amidst the painting, that I’ve somehow entered the canvas. […more]