Richard Diebenkorn (Portland, April 22, 1922 - Berkeley, March 30, 1993) was an American painter.
His early work is associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s, Diebenkorn began his long series of abstract, lyrical, and geometric paintings christened Ocean Park, which have received high acclaim worldwide.
Biography
Youth and Early Achievements
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr. was born on April 22, 1922, in Portland, Oregon. His family moved to San Francisco, California, when the future painter was two years old. An avid draftsman since childhood, Diebenkorn entered Stanford University in 1940, where he met his first two mentors:
professor and muralist Victor Arnautoff, who guided Diebenkorn in the classic formal discipline with oil painting, and Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work of Edward Hopper, who profoundly inspired Diebenkorn's early works.
While attending Stanford University, Diebenkorn visited the home of Sarah Stein, Gertrude Stein's sister-in-law, and saw for the first time the works of the European modernist masters Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse.
Also at Stanford, Diebenkorn met Phyllis Antoinette Gilman, who would become his partner and later wife. They married in 1943 and had two children named Gretchen, born in 1945, and Christopher, born in 1947. Due to the U.S. entry into the war in World War II prompted Deibenkorn to discontinue his studies and not complete his undergraduate degree at Stanford. Diebenkorn joined the Marine Corps in 1943, where he served until 1945.
During his military service, Diebenkorn continued to study art and delved into European modernism before enrolling briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, and later on the East Coast while at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
While enrolled at Berkeley, he studied under three influential and renowned teachers-Worth Ryder, Erle Loran, and Eugene Neuhaus. Both Ryder and Loran had studied art in Europe in the 1920s and had extensive knowledge about European modernism, which they taught to their students.
In contrast, Neuhaus had emigrated from Germany in 1904 and helped make the Bay Area an important artistic focus on the U.S. West Coast. Once he moved to the Quantico base on the East Coast, Diebenkorn took advantage of his location to visit art museums in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York.
This allowed him to study in person the paintings of modern masters such as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.
Also during the same period, Diebenkorn became acquainted with the works of New York artists who were trying their hand at abstract surrealism. One artist who exerted a decisive influence on Diebenkorn was Robert Motherwell. Diebenkorn began his experiments in abstract painting in this way.
In 1945, Diebenkorn was supposed to deploy to Japan; however, with the end of the war, which ended in August 1945, he was discharged and returned to live in the Bay Area.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn lived and worked in various places-San Francisco (1946-47) and Sausalito (1947-50); Woodstock, New York (1947); Albuquerque, New Mexico (1950-52); Urbana, Illinois (1952-53); and Berkeley, California (1953-1966). During these years, he matured his own style of abstract expressionist painting.
After World War II, the attention of the art world shifted from the Paris School to the United States and, in particular, to the New York School. In 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled as a student at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute), which was developing its own vigorous style of abstract expressionism.
In 1947, after ten months spent in Woodstock on a travel grant, Diebenkorn returned to CSFA, where he adopted abstract expressionism as a vehicle for self-expression. He was offered a position on the CSFA faculty in 1947 and taught there until 1950.
He was initially influenced by Clyfford Still, who was also a teacher at CSFA from 1946 to 1950, Arshile Gorky, Hassel Smith and Willem de Kooning. Diebenkorn came to be regarded as an eminent West Coast abstract expressionist.
From 1950 to 1952, Diebenkorn was enrolled in the G.I. Bill in the fine arts department at the University of New Mexico, where he continued to adopt his abstract expressionist style.
Along the 1952-53 academic year, Richard Diebenkorn took a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Urbana, where he taught painting and drawing. In November and December 1952, he had his first solo exhibition in a commercial art gallery, the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles.
In September 1953, Diebenkorn moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York, where he spent the summer. He established his home in Berkeley and stayed there until 1966. It was during the early years of this period that Diebenkorn abandoned his strict adherence to abstract expressionism and began working on a more representational style.
By the mid-1950s, Diebenkorn became an important figurative painter, and his style served as a bridge between Henri Matisse and Abstract Expressionism.
Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Henry Villierme, David Park, James Weeks and others participated in a renaissance of figurative painting, dubbed the Bay Area Figurative Movement. His works usually depicted interiors, landscapes, still lifes, and human figures.
Richard Diebenkorn's Success
Diebenkorn began to have further success beginning in the 1960s, a period when he was invited to several group exhibitions and where he held several solo shows. In 1960, a mid-career retrospective devoted to Diebenkorn was held at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).
That fall, a related exhibition was held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In the summer of 1961, while he was a visiting instructor at UCLA, Diebenkorn first became familiar with printmaking when his graduate assistant introduced him to the technique of drypoint printing.
Even while in Southern California, Diebenkorn was a guest at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now the Tamarind Institute), where he worked on a series of prints that was finished in 1962.
Upon his return to Berkeley in the fall of 1961, Diebenkorn began to delve into drypoint and printmaking at Crown Point Press, a fine arts print shop owned by Kathan Brown. In 1965, Crown Point Press printed and published an edition of thirteen bound volumes and twelve unbound sheets of Diebenkorn's first suite of prints, 41 Etchings Drypoints.
This project was the first publication of the Crown Point catalog. Diebenkorn did not create any more works with etchings until 1977, when Brown renewed their artistic relationship. From then until 1992, Diebenkorn returned almost annually to Crown Point Press to produce more works.
Also in the fall of 1961, Diebenkorn became a faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught periodically until 1966. He also taught intermittently during these years at other colleges, including the College of Arts and Crafts and California Mills College in Oakland, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
In September 1963, Diebenkorn was appointed the first resident artist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, a position that lasted until June of the following year. His sole responsibility in this position was to make artwork in a studio provided by the university. Students were allowed to visit him in the studio during scheduled times. Although he produced few paintings during his time at Stanford, Diebenkorn nevertheless produced a large number of drawings. The University held an exhibition devoted to all these drawings at the end of Diebenkorn's stay at Stanford.
From the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1965, Diebenkorn traveled through Europe and was granted a cultural visa to visit important Soviet museums, where he saw the works of Matisse.
When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965, his works summed up everything he had learned from more than a decade as a leading figurative painter.
The Ocean Park series, his later years and death
Henri Matisse's paintings The Open Window at Collioure and View of Notre-Dame, which were both created in 1914, exerted an enormous influence on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series of paintings.
According to art historian Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn reportedly saw both of Matisse's paintings at an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, and they had an enormous effect on him and his painting style. Referring to the January 1966 exhibition, Livingston wrote:
"It is difficult not to attach tremendous weight to this experience in the direction his work has taken since that time. Two images he saw reverberated in almost every canvas in Ocean Park. The views of Notre Dame and the Open Window at Collioure, both painted in 1914, were exhibited for the first time in the United States."
Livingston also asserted that "Diebenkorn must have regarded The Open Window at Collioure as an epiphany."
In September 1966, Diebenkorn moved to Santa Monica, California, and took a professorship at UCLA. He moved into a small studio in the same building as his old Bay Area friend, Sam Francis. In the winter of 1966-67, he returned to abstraction, this time in a clearly personal, geometric style that clearly departed from his early Abstract Expressionist period.
The Ocean Park series, begun in 1967 and developed for the next 18 years, became his most famous work and numbers some 135 paintings. Based on the aerial landscape and perhaps the view from his studio window, these large-scale abstract compositions were named after a community in Santa Monica where he had his studio.
Diebenkorn retired from UCLA in 1973. The Ocean Park series bridged his earlier abstract expressionist with color fied and lyrical abstraction.
In 1979 he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an associate member, and in 1982 he became a full academic.
In 1986 Diebenkorn decided to leave Santa Monica and Southern California. After traveling and observing different areas in the western United States, in 1988 Diebenkorn and his wife settled in Healdsburg, California, where he built a new studio.
In 1989 he began to suffer serious health problems related to heart disease. Although he continued to produce prints, drawings and smaller paintings, his ill health prevented him from finishing large paintings. In 1990, Diebenkorn produced a series of six etchings for the Arion Press edition of Poems of W. B. Yeats, with poems selected and introduced by Helen Vendler.
In 1991, Diebenkorn was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Diebenkorn died of complications from emphysema in Berkeley on March 30, 1993.
After Richard Diebenkorn's death
In 2012, Diebenkorn's work Ocean Park #48 (1971) sold at Christie's for $13.25 million, and became the artist's most expensive painting ever sold at auction, beating the previous Christie's record when a 1980 Ocean Park #48 earned him $7.69 million.
During a Sotheby's sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon's private collection, Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani bought Ocean Park # 89 (1975), an abstract image of a sunset, for $9.68 million.
Diebenkorn's works are collected in several museums and public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Corcoran Gallery of Art,
the de Young Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts.