Richard Diebenkorn

Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for. —Richard Diebenkorn Among the most renowned artists to emerge from postwar California, Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) is recognized as a key figure in the development of American art. Diebenkorn started out as a representational artist, before gaining fame for work in the Abstract Expressionist mode. He developed a uniquely experimental approach to figuration in the mid-1950s, and a decade later, returned to abstraction with his masterful Ocean Park series (1967–88). Born in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco and attended Stanford University. Serving in the Marine Corps during World War II and stationed in North Carolina and Virginia, he visited art collections in Washington, DC; New York; and Philadelphia, where he studied important works by Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian. Upon his return to the Bay Area, he attended the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute). In 1946, he received the prestigious Albert Bender grant-in-aid, funding that enabled him to relocate temporarily to Woodstock, New York, where he made occasional, strategic visits to New York City’s galleries and museums. During that year, his wife, Phyllis, recalled that he “learned about color” and “painted from dawn till dusk.” In 1947, he was invited to join the California School of Fine Arts faculty. Following his first solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1948, Diebenkorn enrolled at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1950 for a master of arts degree. There, he produced paintings characterized by spatially ambiguous colored planes, energetic brushwork, and meandering calligraphic lines that synthesize the improvisatory spirit of Abstract Expressionism with desert landscapes seen from above. After a year teaching in Urbana, Illinois, and the summer months in New York, he moved back to California in the fall of 1953. With the Berkeley abstractions (1953–56), his palette became more vibrant and his compositions more complex. In 1955, Diebenkorn and his Bay Area colleagues Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, David Park, and others, worked in a figurative style, meeting weekly to draw from live models. “I came to mistrust my desire to explode the picture and supercharge it some way,” he recalled of his earlier abstract practice, finding that his new representational approach challenged him to relate subjects to their environments. Marked by a command of color and painterly use of layering and visible revision, the artist’s figures, landscapes and cityscapes, interiors, and still lifes expand upon the experimental spontaneity and compositional rigors of his Abstract Expressionist work. In 1966, Diebenkorn relocated to Southern California for a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles and established his studio in the beachfront neighborhood of Ocean Park, Santa Monica. There he returned to nonobjective art with the Ocean Park series, which would become his largest body of work. This expansive series encompasses paintings and related works on paper, melding layered color with gestural application structured by architectonic lines. With visible underpainting that reveals aspects of his creative process, the wall-commanding canvases feature planes of rich, contrasting colors, irregular grids, plummeting diagonals, and subtly arcing curves. A major traveling retrospective organized in 1977 by Linda L. Cathcart at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, affirmed Diebenkorn’s national reputation. In the Clubs and Spades works of the 1970s and 1980s, Diebenkorn built on elements and shapes that had fascinated him since childhood. The graphic variations on abstract symbols produced during these years represent an extraordinary body of drawings and prints. In 1988, a major exhibition of Diebenkorn’s works on paper was organized by Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield in New York and traveled throughout the United States. Also in 1988, the artist returned to Northern California to settle in Healdsburg, where he concentrated primarily on works on paper, collages, and prints before his death in 1993. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1991 and the Gold Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994.