Richard Diebenkorn | |
|---|---|
 Richard Diebenkorn in 1986 | |
| Born | (1922-04-22)April 22, 1922 Portland, Oregon, US |
| Died | March 30, 1993(1993-03-30) (aged 70) |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Bay Area Figurative Movement,abstract expressionism,Color Field painting,lyrical abstraction |
Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated withabstract expressionism and theBay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s, he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as theOcean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.Art critic,Michael Kimmelman, described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life."[1]
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr. was born on April 22, 1922, inPortland, Oregon. His family moved to San Francisco, California, when he was two years old.[2] From the age of four or five he was continually drawing.[3] In 1940, Diebenkorn enteredStanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors, professor and muralistVictor Arnautoff, who guided Diebenkorn in classical formal discipline with oil paint, and Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work ofEdward Hopper.[4]Hopper's influence can be seen in Diebenkorn's representational work of this time. While attending Stanford, Diebenkorn visited the home ofSarah Stein, the sister-in-law ofGertrude Stein, and first saw the works of European modernist mastersCézanne,Picasso, andMatisse.[5]
Also at Stanford, Diebenkorn met his fellow student and future wife, Phyllis Antoinette Gilman. They married in 1943 and went on to have two children together, a daughter, Gretchen (1945), and a son, Christopher (1947). The beginning of the United States's involvement in World War II interrupted Deibenkorn's education at Stanford, and he was not able complete his degree at that time.[6] Diebenkorn entered theUnited States Marine Corps in 1943, where he served until 1945.[7]
While enlisted, Diebenkorn continued to study art and expanded his knowledge of European modernism, first while enrolled briefly at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and later on the East Coast, while stationed at theMarine base in Quantico, Virginia. While enrolled at Berkeley he had three influential teachers:Worth Ryder,Erle Loran, andEugene Neuhaus.[8] Both Ryder andErle Loran had studied art in Europe in the 1920s and brought their first-hand knowledge of European modernism to their teaching. Neuhaus emigrated from Germany in 1904 and was a seminal figure in establishing the Bay Area as a center of art appreciation and education on the West Coast.[9] On the East Coast, when he transferred to the base in Quantico, Diebenkorn took advantage of his location to visit art museums in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York City. This allowed him to study in person the paintings of modern masters such asPierre Bonnard,Georges Braque,Henri Matisse,Joan Miró, andPablo Picasso. Also at this time, he had his first exposure to the new New York–based artists who were beginning their abstract Surrealism-based paintings. The work ofRobert Motherwell, in particular, left an impression. Diebenkorn began his own experiments in abstract painting.[5][8]
In 1945, Diebenkorn was scheduled to deploy to Japan; however, with the war's end in August 1945, he was discharged and returned to life in the Bay Area.[8]
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn lived and worked in various places: San Francisco andSausalito (1946–47 and 1947–1950),Woodstock, New York (1947),Albuquerque, New Mexico (1950–1952),Urbana, Illinois (1952–53), andBerkeley, California (1953–1966).[10] He developed his own style ofabstract expressionist painting. After World War II, the art world's focus shifted from theSchool of Paris to the United States and, in particular, to theNew York School. In 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled as a student in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco (now known as theSan Francisco Art Institute), which was developing its own vigorous style of abstract expressionism. In 1947, after ten months in Woodstock on an Alfred Bender travel grant, Diebenkorn returned to the CSFA, where he adopted abstract expressionism as his vehicle for self-expression. He was offered a place on the CSFA faculty in 1947 and taught there until 1950. He was influenced at first byClyfford Still, who also taught at the CSFA from 1946 to 1950,Arshile Gorky, Hassel Smith, andWillem de Kooning. Diebenkorn became a leading abstract expressionist on the West Coast. From 1950 to 1952, Diebenkorn was enrolled under theG.I. Bill in theUniversity of New Mexico’s graduate fine arts department, where he continued to adapt his abstract expressionist style.[11]
For the academic year 1952–53, Richard Diebenkorn took a faculty position at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he taught painting and drawing. In November and December 1952, he had his first solo exhibit at a commercial art gallery, the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles.[12][13]
In September 1953, Diebenkorn moved to back to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he had spent the summer.[14] He took a position atCalifornia College of Arts and Crafts in 1955, teaching until 1958.[15] He established his home in Berkeley and lived there until 1966. During the first few years of this period, Diebenkorn abandoned his strict adherence to abstract expressionism and began to work in a more representational style. By the mid-1950s, Diebenkorn had become an important figurative painter, in a style that bridgedHenri Matisse and abstract expressionism. Diebenkorn,Elmer Bischoff,Henry Villierme,David Park, James Weeks, and others participated in a renaissance of figurative painting, dubbed theBay Area Figurative Movement. His subject matter during this period included interiors, landscapes, still lifes, and the human figure.
Diebenkorn began to have a measure of success with his artwork during this period. He was included in several group shows and had several solo exhibits.[16] In 1960, a mid-career retrospective was presented by the Pasadena Art Museum (now theNorton Simon Museum). That autumn, a variation of the show moved to theCalifornia Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.[17]In the summer of 1961, while a visiting instructor atUCLA, Diebenkorn first became acquainted with printmaking when his graduate assistant introduced him to the printmaking technique ofdrypoint.[18] Also while in Southern California, Diebenkorn was a guest at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now theTamarind Institute), where he worked on a suite of prints completed in 1962.[19]
Upon his return to Berkeley in the fall of 1961, Diebenkorn began seriously exploring drypoint and printmaking withKathan Brown at her newly established fine arts printing press,Crown Point Press. In 1965, Crown Point Press printed and published an edition of thirteen bound volumes and twelve unbound folios of Diebenkorn's first suite of prints,41 Etchings Drypoints. This project was the first publication of Crown Point's catalog). Diebenkorn would not do any more etching again until 1977 when Brown renewed their artistic relationship. From then until 1992, Diebenkorn returned almost yearly to Crown Point Press to produce work.[18]
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 a number of other colleges, including theCalifornia College of Arts and Crafts andMills College in Oakland, theUniversity of Southern California (USC), theUniversity of Colorado, Boulder, and theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[20]
In September 1963, Diebenkorn was named the first artist-in-residence atStanford University in Palo Alto, California, an appointment that lasted until June 1964. His only responsibility in this position was to produce art in a studio provided by the university. Students were allowed to visit him in the studio during scheduled times. Though he created a few paintings during his time at Stanford, he produced many drawings. Stanford presented an extensive show of these drawings at the end of his residency.[21]
From fall 1964 to spring 1965, Diebenkorn traveled through Europe, and he was granted a cultural visa to visit important Soviet museums and view their holdings of Matisse's paintings. When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965, his works summed up all he had learned from more than a decade as a leading figurative painter.[22]
TheHenri Matisse paintingsFrench Window at Collioure, andView of Notre-Dame,[23] both from 1914, exerted tremendous influence on Richard Diebenkorn'sOcean Park paintings.According to art historianJane Livingston, Diebenkorn saw both Matisse paintings in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, which enormously affected him and his work.[24] Livingston said about the January 1966 Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles,
It is difficult not to ascribe enormous weight to this experience for the direction his work took from that time on. Two pictures he saw there reverberate in almost everyOcean Park canvas.View of Notre Dame and theFrench Window at Collioure, painted in 1914, were on view for the first time in the US.[24]
Livingston said, "Diebenkorn must have experiencedFrench Window at Collioure as an epiphany."[25]
In September 1966, Diebenkorn moved toSanta Monica, California, and took up a professorship atUCLA.[26] He moved into a small studio space in the same building as his old friend from the Bay Area, Sam Francis. During this time, he lived in a house on Amalfi Drive inSanta Monica Canyon, where he would host an artist collective.[27] In the winter of 1966–67, he returned to abstraction, this time in a distinctly personal, geometric style that departed from his early abstract expressionist period. TheOcean Park series, begun in 1967 and developed for the next 18 years, became his most famous work and resulted in approximately 135 paintings. Based on theaerial 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.[28] Diebenkorn retired from UCLA in 1973. TheOcean Park series bridged his earlier abstract expressionist works withcolor field painting andlyrical abstraction.
In 1986, Diebenkorn decided to leave Santa Monica and Southern California.[29] After traveling and looking around several different areas in the western United States, in 1988, Diebenkorn and his wife settled inHealdsburg, California, where he built a new studio.[30] As part of hisOcean Park series, Diebenkorn produced a set of color monotypes in collaboration with publisher and master printerGarner Tullis in 1988.[31] In 1989 he began suffering serious health issues related to heart disease. Though still producing prints, drawings, and smaller paintings, his poor health prevented him from completing larger paintings.[32] In 1990, Diebenkorn produced a series of six etchings for theArion Press edition ofPoems ofW. B. Yeats, with poems selected and introduced byHelen Vendler.
Diebenkorn died due to complications fromemphysema in Berkeley on March 30, 1993.
Diebenkorn had his first show at theCalifornia Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco 1948. The first important retrospective of his work took place at theAlbright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976–77; the show, then traveled to Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In 1989,John Elderfield, then a curator at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York, organized a show of Diebenkorn's works on paper, which constituted an important part of his production.[33]
In 2008 The Phillips Collection exhibitedDiebenkorn in New Mexico, an exhibition organized by TheHarwood Museum of Art, Taos, of the University of New Mexico. The exhibit examined the works Diebenkorn created during his 30 months in New Mexico. During the exhibition’s run, The Phillips Collection also displayed its Diebenkorn works, including paintings from his renowned Berkeley andOcean Park series.
In 2012, an exhibition,Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, traveled to theModern Art Museum of Fort Worth, theOrange County Museum of Art, and theCorcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.[34]
Major recent shows in the San Francisco Bay Area have includedDiebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, July–September 2013, at the De Young Museum, San Francisco; an exhibition of small works, June 6–August 23, 2015, at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma; andMatisse/Diebenkorn, a major show highlighting Matisses's influence on Richard Diebenkorn, March 11–May 29, 2017, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Diebenkorn's work can be found in a number of public collections including theNew Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico;[35]Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii;[36]Albertina, Vienna, Austria;Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York;Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago;Baltimore Museum of Art;Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh;Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; thede Young Museum, San Francisco;[10]Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,[37] Michigan,Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.;Los Angeles County Museum of Art;Minneapolis Institute of Art;Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas;Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.;San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco;Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and theWhitney Museum of American Art, New York.[38] TheIris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts atStanford University is home to 29 of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks as well as a collection of paintings and other works on paper.[39]
In 1978, Diebenkorn was awarded TheEdward MacDowell Medal byThe MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.[40]
In 1991, Diebenkorn was awarded theNational Medal of Arts.[41] In 1979, he was elected into theNational Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1982.[citation needed]
In 2018, Diebenkorn'sOcean Park #126 painted in 1984 became the most expensive picture by the artist auctioned when it went for $23.9 million atChristie's New York. The previous record from 2012, also at Christie's, wasOcean Park #48 painted in 1971 for $13.5 million.[42][43] At a 2014Sotheby's sale ofRachel Lambert Mellon's private collection, Italian fashion designerValentino Garavani boughtOcean Park #89 (1975), an abstract image of a sunset, for $9.68 million.[44]
AuthorWilliam Benton made a painting in the style of Diebenkorn'sOcean Park for a friend who was a big admirer of the artist's work. At the back of the painting, Benton wrote a message signed with Diebenkorn's name. When the friend died in 1995, his estate was evaluated and an appraiser, not knowing the paintings provenance, marked the work as worth $50–60,000.[45]
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