Of all the Bay Area painters who took part in that seminal 1957 exhibition at the Oakland Museum, it is Richard Diebenkorn who has remained at the forefront of American painting history. Why is this?

Diebenkorn had one foot in both worlds. He had spent the previous years in Berkeley playing with abstraction in his landscapes and these geometries carried over into the work of 57. The figures are solid but the faces are not--he was not yet willing to go that far. There are no nudes on beaches. There is Matisse in these works especially in this one, Man and Woman in a Large Room, now at the Hirshhorn.

Here is an artist sketching and a woman standing by, and a similar sense of quiet confrontation between the pair as in the Bischoff image (yesterday's post), but a model with no face is clearly more of an object than a subject. There is an air of stillness as there would be between artist and model, but also, in the darker palette, an air of intensity. What will happen in the next moments after the sketching session is finished?

In the corner on the right, through the crack of a doorway, we see a slice of what was to eventually become the kind of brighter, flat, colorful landscape of the Ocean Park series for which he his so famous but the room itself is already broken down into the geometries that were to eventually take pride of place.

By 1963, Diebenkorn was back at the figureless landscapes in Berkeley which then gave way to the more sun drenched landscapes of southern California.

When I drive through Ocean Park today, I try to imagine him distilling this tract of land which is now bordered by so much commercial activity. But here in this interior, I feel only the pregnant moment of what was to come.