Richard
Diebenkorn is most widely known for his signature large-scale,
vivid abstractions known as the Ocean Park paintings.
His abstract, as well as his earlier figurative work,
explores the balance between surface modulation and
illusionistic depth, between the establishment of structure
and its disintegration in light and space.
Diebenkorn born in Portland, Oregon, on April 22nd in
1922. He was raised in California and lived there for
most of his life. As a young child, he was fascinated
by medieval heraldry and Bayeux Tapestries. His first
interest was in the American illustrators Howard Pyle
(1853–1911) and N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945).
He studied at Stanford University from 1940 to 1943
and received his first formal art training with Daniel
Mendelowitz, who introduced him to the work of Edward
Hopper, and to paintings by the artists of the Ecole
de Paris such as Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. Diebenkorn's
study was interrupted by service in the Marine Corps
during World War II, but while stationed at Quantico,
VA, he often visited the Phillips Collection in Washington,
DC. There, Henri Matisse's Studio, Quai Saint-Michel
(1916) inspired him. Matisse's technique of exposing
the painting process, marrying indoor and outdoor space
and aligning the planes of the composition with the
edges of the canvas itself raised formal issues that
Diebenkorn did not forget. In
1946 Diebenkorn returned to California to continue
his education at the California School of Fine Arts
(CSFA) from 1946 to 1947 with David Park, whom he
met in the first week and who would become his most
important teacher and friend. Park encouraged him
to look at the work of Joan Miró and Picasso.
During the mid-1940s he also became aware of the work
of Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes. However,
it was not until 1948 that he first saw paintings
by Willem de Kooning in magazine reproductions. In
1947 Diebenkorn was offered a position on the faculty
of the CSFA, which at the time included Park, Elmer
Bischoff, Clyfford Still and, during the summer of
1947 and of 1948, Mark Rothko. His teaching career
lasted more than two decades with few breaks. He enrolled
at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in
1950 and received his MFA in 1951. His abstract paintings
of this period, such as Albuquerque No. 4 (1951; St
Louis, MO, A. Mus.), were stylistically rooted in
the New York school; they were characterized by linear
planes, which gave the impression of aerial landscape
views, and by a fluid line that defined a type of
biomorphic abstraction. His palette resembled that
of de Kooning but, in fact, the pinks and earth colours
were derived from the New Mexico landscape.
The
travelling Matisse retrospective exhibition that Diebenkorn
saw on a trip to Los Angeles in 1952 influenced paintings
such as Urbana No. 4, which he made while teaching
at the University of Illinois. At the end of the school
year in 1953 he briefly considered moving to New York
but instead returned to Berkeley where he established
a studio. The Berkeley paintings of 1953 to 1955,
such as Berkeley No. 23, are evidence of his personal
response to Abstract Expressionism, in particular
to the gestural force of de Kooning and the colour
veils of Rothko. The sense of landscape predominates
in these dense, calligraphic canvases, and in 1954
Life magazine appropriately used the term ‘abstract
landscape' in association with his work.
Diebenkorn
moved around a lot from 1945-1955, following jobs
and study opportunities from the Bay Area to New York,
New Mexico, Urbana, Illinois, and finally back to
Berkeley. On his return to the Bay Area, Diebenkorn
renewed his friendships with Park and Bischoff, both
of whom had recently given up abstraction for figuration.
Toward the end of 1955, feeling that the highly expressionist
Berkeley paintings offered no room for the thoughtful
aspect of the painting process, Diebenkorn too began
to make more straightforward reference to observed
subjects. The small studio still-lifes of 1955 and
1956, such as Still-life with Orange Peel, seemed
to signal a new era in the artist's progression.
The
period of Diebenkorn's figurative work corresponds
to his remaining years as a teacher in the Bay Area,
with
the exception of the last of the Berkeley abstractions
in 1955.
With Park, Bischoff and other artists such as Nathan
Oliveira, William Theo Brown and Paul Wonner, Diebenkorn
became known as one of the founders of the Bay Area
figurative school. He always resisted the notion of
a ‘school' in any formal sense, noting that
the artists involved simply enjoyed a close association,
but he led the way in developing a unique northern
Californian realism. Paintings such as Figure on Porch
continued the fluid, horizontal landscape references
of the Berkeley series, while they introduced a skeletal
grid with elements, such as a solitary figure anchoring
shallow space at a central point. The new colors,
such as intense blues, greens and yellows, were those
of the California landscape. After visiting the former
Soviet Union in 1964, where he saw paintings by Matisse
previously in the Shchukin Collection, he paid further
homage to him in his use of arabesques and fusions
of exterior and interior spaces. He noted: "At
about this time, the figure thing was running its
course. Things really started to flatten out. . .
. I'm relating this to Matisse, because of course
[his] painting is much flatter in its conception than
my own."
The
titles of Diebenkorn's paintings often alluded to
the places that inspired them. His move to the Los
Angeles area in 1966 to teach at the University of
California at Los Angeles (UCLA) led to a dramatic
change in his work. One of his last figurative paintings,
Window, was made after he settled in Santa Monica.
It recalls Matisse in the forms of the balcony door,
restates the familiar empty chair motif and introduces
the broad, open expanses of colour suggested by the
view from his new Ocean Park studio.
From
that time, in a series of more than 140 paintings
entitled Ocean Park, Diebenkorn gave priority to formal
concerns in his majestic abstract compositions. He
established himself as an abstractionist, and seemed
to be firmly grounded in that concept. Eliminating
the figure but retaining allusions to the landscape,
he created paintings distinguished by geometric scaffolding
visibly aligned and re-aligned, overlaid with glazes
of vivid color. Ocean Park No. 83 typifies his continuous
struggle to balance structural elements, proportion,
spatial illusion, the weight of his sensuous lines
(the ‘bones' of the composition) and the mutations
of atmospheric colour. Characteristically, the works
are broadly brushed yet animated by small passages
of detail. Although he made no studies for the Ocean
Park paintings, preferring to work directly on the
canvas, his prints and drawings, such as Untitled
(1980), provide the most intimate access to his highly
personal search for order and the means to express
it. In 1988 he left Santa Monica to return to the
Bay Area, where he built a studio in Healdsburg, in
the vineyards north of San Francisco. After a heart
attack in 1989, followed by a series of operations
and illnesses, he gave up working on his characteristically
large canvases to concentrate on a series of gouache
drawings.
Richard
Diebenkorn, one of the last great modern painters,
passed away on March 30th, 1993.
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