This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  RICHARD CLIFFORD DIEBENKORN JR. (1922- 1993)
Born in Portland, Oregon, Richard Diebenkorn became a key figure in the
Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland) figurative and abstract school of
painting.
When he was two, his family moved to San Francisco. His
grandmother encouraged Diebenkorn’s early art talent, and he remembered
often drawing locomotives on shirt cardboards as a child. He was
also intrigued with medieval heraldry and the French Bayeux
Tapestries. Late in life, he reminisced about the tapestries:
“The main events are central and in flanking panels above and below, …
dead men and coats of arms; dialogues paralleling one another,
horizontally.” (C.Horsley).
In 1940 he entered Stanford University, where he studied oil painting
with Victor Arnautoff and Daniel Mendelowitz. In 1946 he enrolled at
the California School of Fine Art, where he met artists David Park and
Elmer Bischoff. At the CSFA Diebenkorn was befriended by Park,
both an artist and teacher, who was wary of some New York artists'
‘egocentrism’ that he found in ‘The Doctrine of Action Painting’ and
Abstract Expressionism. Diebenkorn’s work from this period was
first exhibited at a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the
Legion of Honor in 1948. In the 1940's, Diebenkorn also traveled to New
York, immersing himself in the Abstract Expressionist milieu, and
becoming familiar with the works of Robert Motherwell, Bradley Tomlin
Walker, and William Baziotes. In New York he also became interested in
jazz, even to the point of taking up, briefly, the trombone. Diebenkorn
received his undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1949, and in 1950
left the Bay Area to attend University of New Mexico at Albuquerque,
where he received his MFA in 1951. While in New Mexico, he became
fascinated with aerial vistas.
He served in the active reserves during World War II, and in 1953
returned to study some more at Berkeley, where he remained for several
years. There he studied with abstract expressionist, Hans
Hofmann. Other artists who were influential to Diebenkorn include
Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, Piet Mondrian, Arshile Gorky, Willem de
Kooning, Mark Rothko and Henri Matisse. During these years,
Diebenkorn made trips with his wife, Phyllis, to the Phillips
Collection in Washington D.C., where visitors could sit, smoke (at that
time), talk and absorb the works of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Pierre
Bonnard and Matisse, among others. Diebenkorn was particularly stuck by
the pentimenti (traces of underlying pigment) in some of the Matisse
pictures.
Pentimenti are frequently found in Diebenkorn’s works, and these
and other ‘human touches’ could almost appear as errors, or mistakes,
but rather are very important to his art, adding a painterly
touch. His ‘crudities’, as he called his intentionally left
splotches and pentimenti, are his touchstones of frailty, perhaps even frustration.
His renunciation of abstraction for more realistic figures was the
beginning of the Bay Area figurative school, an alternative to the
mainstream. A typical Diebenkorn figure is usually a woman in a
room, often with his wife, Phyllis, posed as the model. Usually the
figures are expressionless, lonely, and acquiescent seeming.
David A. Ross, the director of the Whitney Museum, observed that
"Diebenkorn emerges at the century's end as an artist who restored to
late modernism the sense of the sublime that seemed to fade with each
successive decade after World War II."
Diebenkorn made a switch from abstractions to figurative work for most
of the 1960's. Then, in the late 1960s, he returned to
abstraction, shifting planes of color, inspired by seeing Matisses at
the Hermitage in Russia. This influence led to his noted Ocean Park
series, begun in 1967 after moving to Santa Monica, and which he
continued to work on for decades, ultimately resulting in close to 200
works. He began teaching at UCLA in 1966 and remained there until
1973. In 1978 he represented the United States at the Venice
Biennale.
In the early 1980s, he began the closing chapter to his work, which
included the depiction of heraldic emblems in collage and
gouache. Diebenkorn moved in 1988 from Santa Monica to Healdsburg
in northern California, where he continued to create primarily small
works, some of them drawings, until his death in 1993. He
experimented with different materials and smaller scale, sometimes
executing paintings on cigar box covers. His technique also
changed and some of the works seemed to have a fluid undercurrent and a
sort of Byzantine, or Sienese, sense of ornamentation. Two years
before his death in 1993, he painted Untitled No. 10, a horizontal work that is a design for a beautiful flag, a new vision that might have led to a major series important as Ocean Park.
In 1991 he was the recipient of the National Medal of Art, and his work
was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition.
Sources:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
website of the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College
website of the Whitney Museum of Art
Carter B. Horsley, author of Strength in Reserve –Tension Beneath Calm; website of thecityreview.com.
| |
Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A-D):
| Richard Diebenkorn’s abstractions balance depth and surface, structure and field. His Ocean Park series stands among the most eloquent and luminous paintings of the 1960s and 70s.
Raised in San Francisco, Diebenkorn developed an early interest in art, particularly in the work of illustrators Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. His service in World War II interrupted his education at Stanford University; after the war he continued his studies at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), where his teachers included David Park, who became an important influence and a close friend. During this period, Diebenkorn learned of the innovations of the New York School, and he gained first-hand knowledge of contemporary abstraction when he joined the faculty of the CSFA. His colleagues there included Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko.
During a period in Albuquerque in the early 1950s, he created abstracted paintings defined by linear planes and pinks and browns inspired by the local landscape. In the mid-1950s, Diebenkorn was exploring Abstract Expressionism through strong gesture and washes of color; the sense of landscape predominates in these compositions. Later in the decade, Diebenkorn returned to more figurative work-- a move that distinguished his paintings from the abstract idioms that dominated the avant-garde art world. Along with his colleagues Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Nathan Oliveira, among others, Diebenkorn became known as a founder of the Bay Area figurative school. His images of people and interiors from this period are often structured by rectangular shapes and squared-off forms. These would develop into the grids that the artist would continue to employ as an organizing and anchoring principle for his work.
It was Diebenkorn’s move to Southern California to take a teaching position at UCLA that inspired his best-known work. Beginning in 1967, he created more than 140 paintings in what became his Ocean Park series, named after his Santa Monica neighborhood. The skeletal scaffolding of these paintings create interlocking planes, overlaid with pale transparent color, that suggest, by turns, roads, horizon lines, and the ocean. Diebenkorn acknowledged the influence of Matisse in his oeuvre; the subtly bright palette and planar ambiguities of the Ocean Park paintings testify to this appreciation.
Diebenkorn left the Los Angeles area in 1988 and moved back to northern California, where he built a studio in Healdsburg, in Sonoma County. In ill health in his last years, he created small-scale gouaches and etchings, including an extensive series based on an image of a coat and a group of prints intended to illustrate a publication of W. B. Yeats’ poetry. He died in Berkeley in 1993.
© Copyright 2010 Hollis Taggart Galleries |
Biography from Leslie Sacks Fine Art:
| Born in Portland, Oregon, Richard Diebenkorn became a key figure in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland) figurative school of painting. Richard Diebenkorn studied at Stanford University and later at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he studied with but was not greatly influenced by Abstract Expressionist, Hans Hofmann. Richard Diebenkorn credited Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, and Arshile Gorky as major influences on his painting.
In the 1950's, Richard Diebenkorn's work was largely abstract with emphasis on gestural brushwork and strong composition. His figurative work was marked by vibrant colors forming spaces into which Richard Diebenkorn would place a simplified or seated figure. The figurative work of Richard Diebenkorn helped mark the beginning of the Bay Area figurative school.
In the mid-1960's, Richard Diebenkorn settled in Santa Monica, CA. Around this time, he turned away from imagery and focused on the abstract with his "Ocean Park" series. These paintings are geometric abstractions of line and space with visible reminders of all the underlying reworking. The influence of California - it's light and color, and coastal allusions to sky, ocean, seaside and sun - can be seen in these works.
In 1988 Richard Diebenkorn 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 and two beautifully refined etchings made at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, in 1991 and 1992. |
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Richard Diebenkorn is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
Modernism
California Painters
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