In Praise of the Decorative Impulse: Gopnik v. Updike

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 79 (1975)

I found Adam Gopnik’s praise of the decorative impulse, in his recent “Fluid Dynamics” (The New Yorker, April 12, 2021), refreshing. Too often abstraction is condescended to as merely decorative. Recall John Updike’s famous putdown of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 79 (1975): “Meeting a painting like this, so beautiful in its balanced tones and enigmatic nervousness, not in our reductive pages but on a suitably large wall, we accept it as ‘art,’ an expensive variety of wallpaper” (Just Looking, 1989). 

I read that many years ago and never forgot it. Is that what abstraction is – “an expensive variety of wallpaper”? Gopnik provides a tonic counter-perspective: “For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything.”