Richard Diebenkorn
Blue with Red by Richard Diebenkorn
1987

About the Item

Richard Diebenkorn woodcut on echizen kozo washi paper 37 x 25" 1987 signed by artist *edition of 200 Framed in a beautiful maple frame. museum plexi glass PERFECT condition! Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) maintained his love of vivid color and structured composition in both his abstract and representational works. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1922, Diebenkorn moved with his family to San Francisco in 1924. After attending Stanford University from 1940 to 1942, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he concentrated on art classes. In the winter of 1944, when he was stationed in Virginia, he frequently visited The Phillips Collection, where he was inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. He particularly admired Matisse’s technique of structuring space through planes of color, merging indoor and outdoor space. Returning to San Francisco in 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with David Park, an expressionist artist from the Bay Area. Awarded a fellowship the same year, he moved East, living and working in Woodstock, New York, visiting New York City, and making many contacts. After returning to San Francisco, where he defined himself as a leading Bay Area artist, he was appointed to the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947, a position he held for two years; his fellow teachers included Elmer Bischoff, Edward Corbett, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still. Diebenkorn had his first one-person show in 1948 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. After receiving a degree from Stanford University in 1949, he was awarded an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. He briefly taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana 1952-53, settling shortly thereafter in Berkeley, California. Diebenkorn often titled his works after places that provided him with inspiration, such as his Berkeley paintings. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn followed a distinctive abstract vocabulary of forms, stylistically rooted in the New York School, placing him firmly within the ethos of American modernism. However, in 1955 he shifted from abstraction to a more representational mode, making reference to observed subjects. Until 1967, when he returned to abstraction, Diebenkorn executed still-lifes, landscapes and interior figure paintings that present his finely tuned sense of color and structure. From 1955 to 1973 Diebenkorn taught at several California arts institutions, including a position at UCLA (1967) while he worked in a studio in the Ocean Park district of Santa Monica. There he created his last representational works, but returned to abstraction with his Ocean Park paintings. This series is characterized by broadly brushed surfaces of luminescent and atmospheric color, affirming the artist’s continuing concern with formal issues. These abstract brilliantly colored works—both paintings and drawings—elicited great acclaim, and The Phillips Collection owns three works from this series. Diebenkorn remained a prolific artist until his death in Berkeley, California, in 1993.

Creator:
Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993, American)
Creation Year:
1987
Dimensions:
Height: 37 in (93.98 cm)Width: 25 in (63.5 cm)
Medium:
Washi Paper,Woodcut
Movement & Style:
Neo-Expressionist
Period:
1990-1999
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Morton Grove, IL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU362516892

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Richard Diebenkorn

Known for his gestural yet geometric depictions of American landscapes, Richard Diebenkorn blended Abstract Expressionism and figurative painting like no other artist before him.

Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in San Francisco, California, Diebenkorn studied art history at Stanford University before enlisting in the Marines. Afterward, on the G.I. Bill, he enrolled at California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946, where he became an instructor a year later. In 1950, he pursued a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico.

He lived and worked for a period during the postwar years in New York City, where he met Mark Rothko and immersed himself in Robert Motherwell’s art. However, the perspective that Diebenkorn brought to his paintings and prints was firmly rooted in the West Coast. His canvases, even when he worked in an abstract style, evoked California’s sandy coastlines and varied topography — one of the attributes that set him apart from contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston.

Diebenkorn is acclaimed for his representational paintings; he was a founding member of the Bay Area Figurative movement, along with David Park and Elmer Bischoff. But he is best known for his lyrical abstract work. He explored abstraction during the 1950s before switching to figuration — creating still lifes and working with live models — and then returned to abstraction, developing a distinctive style that was entirely his own.

When Diebenkorn moved to Southern California, he began to teach at UCLA and commenced work on what would become his enduring “Ocean Park” series, named for the Santa Monica suburb he called home as of 1966 and inspired by the view from his studio — in particular, the light on the landscape outside the windows as framed by the windows themselves. The influence of Henri Matisse loomed large too. Diebenkorn had been an admirer of Matisse’s work since his days in the military, and in 1964, a trip to see the French painter’s work at the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad proved monumental for him.

The “Ocean Park” series, created over the span of two decades, comprised more than 140 large paintings with gentle, shimmering compositions of color arranged in geometric harmony, with the texture of Diebenkorn’s constant reworking of the paint coming through.

“All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression,” Diebenkorn once said. Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and more.

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