American painter and printmaker

Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter whose work spanned several decades and artistic movements, including abstract expressionism and geometric abstraction. Among my peers, he’s considered sacred, an untouchable master who’s kept within the exclusive domain on the highest shelf of the bookcase with the likes of Cy Twombly,  Willem De Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Marsden Hartley. He’s easily considered one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century, a painter’s painter. 

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1922. His family moved to California when he was a child, spending his formative years in Sacramento. He studied art at Stanford University in 1940, but served as a United States Marine from 1943 - 1945. According to the Diebenkorn Foundation biography, his time in the military proved to be pivotal to his development. While stationed in Virginia, he was able to visit a number of important collections of modern art, including MOMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. He was also fortunate enough early on in his academic career to visit the home of Gertrude Stein’s sister-in-law Sarah whose legendary collection included work by Cézanne, Picasso and  Matisse among others.

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

In 1950, Diebenkorn and his wife Phyllis moved to New Mexico where he enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. It was during this time where Diebenkorn’s growth and maturity as a painter was shifted into ludicrous speed by a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) of none other than Arshile Gorky (a massive influence on De Kooning). After some digging I found out that the show was in August of 1941 and on display were paintings from 1921-41. Fortunately for Diebenkorn, he was exposed to Sarah Stein’s collection of Modern art at a pivotal point in his early development, allowing his artistic identity to merge seamlessly with that of his antecedent, Gorky. As did many others, their minds met at the horizon of Picasso and cubism, which for Diebenkorn, was just one stop along a long and winding freeway in the peculiar light and landscapes of the American West where he spent most of his life until he died in 1993. 

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper at LA Louver in Venice, California focuses on the artist’s output in the 1950’s, 70’s and 80’s. Most striking are the works from the 1950’s, ink and graphite on paper. The arresting blue allows a cool distance for contemplation. They immediately wrap themselves around the viewer with such speed and precision, it’s undetectable. There is absolutely no space of a moment between physically seeing them as a distinct object on the wall and the full-on immersion into the psychic rhythm of his lines. It happens that quickly. Gifted story tellers are able to do the same thing. It’s an intangible act, unquantifiable and impossible to explain to someone dying to know the secret. How to fully capture the viewer before they register the entanglement is the goal. If you don’t got it, it can come off in all manner of ways: cringy, heavy handed, maybe even slightly manipulative. If you do have it, well, then you have the entrance stone that can open portals into new worlds.  I’m almost committed to saying that it can’t be taught, but I haven’t reached the level of development as a person to get away with saying that.  But I definitely want to say it.

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These works on paper are decidedly figurative abstraction, which isn’t supposed to be some kind of compromise between the two. The term is meant to indicate a type of abstraction derived from life, from what is seen. The work has physics, an environment, and a type of gravity all of which emerge terrestrially, indicating that this world does indeed have life. The signatures of his work show very clearly what it means to see, to be a seer, one who perceives. The peculiarities of his psychology and physiology are contained within the wavering of his line and his greatest gift to anyone that looks is that he was never insecure enough to retrace them. Diebenkorn split open the boundaries between a coffee cup and the human mind revealing the unseen configurations and spaces of a world with boundaries that are actually quite porous and just maybe a total work of fiction. 

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1953; Ink and Graphite on Paper; © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

March 27 – May 11, 2024

From the Press Release:

About the artist All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. —Richard Diebenkorn Born over 100 years ago, Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) produced a body of work whose beauty and mysteriously empathic nature has long attracted many devotees worldwide. He lived during the period of America’s great surge onto the world stage of visual art, working alongside the likes of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell, but forging a decisively independent style. While still in his twenties he moved briefly to New York from his San Francisco region, realizing that its artistic climate was the most stimulating locus in the United States, but soon returned to California where, aside from two important early years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a year teaching in Urbana, Illinois, he remained.

From a glorious early flowering in the language of Abstract Expressionism, where he responded directly to the light and landscapes of New Mexico and the urban Midwest, Diebenkorn turned to a prolonged period of making figurative and landscape art, going very much against the grain of his generation. A leader in Bay Area figurative painting, Diebenkorn produced work that was received with enormous affection and excitement by a wide audience. Then, quite abruptly in 1966, he turned to a new form of abstraction, again decisively different from his peers. Moving from Berkeley to Los Angeles, he proceeded to make the monumental abstract works known as the “Ocean Park” series, incorporating the lessons of two of his key influences, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian. —Jane Livingston

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