Jed Perl searches for a way to preserve the “stability of painting” without defaulting into academicism. This centers on whether we find cohesion or refusal in series like Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park Series’ (1967–88). Perl finds Diebenkorn’s figures a contribution to the symbolist tradition” in which “enigma of human consciousness is revealed indirectly, through a pictorial environment in which naturalistic perceptions” are “transformed by the myriad processes and pressures of the imagination.” Nicolas Linnert insists Diebenkorn “was never fixed in his focus or aesthetic position on painting… his vacillation between abstraction and representation developed its own sense of cohesion.”