Biography

Few artists have volleyed back and forth between abstraction and representation with the same consistency and success as Richard Diebenkorn. Compelled by the pursuit of pictorial tension and the desire to fully capture the effects of form, light, and structure, Diebenkorn has built an impressive body of work that simultaneously recalls his California identity and positions him within the broader context of American art.

Diebenkorn is perhaps most commonly associated with Bay Area Figurative artists such as David Park and Elmer Bischoff; however, he first made his mark as an abstract expressionist, only shifting to a representational style in late 1955. As a student at Stanford University during the early 1940s, Diebenkorn became acquainted with the work of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso through his professor Daniel Mendelowitz, who took him to visit the private collection of Michael and Sarah Stein in Palo Alto.1 After enlisting in the Marine Corps officer training program in 1943, Diebenkorn was transferred first to the University of California, Berkeley, and then to a base near Washington, D.C., where he enjoyed countless visits to the Phillips Collection to study masterworks of Matisse, Picasso, and Paul Cézanne. Following his discharge from the marines in 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), a major pocket of postwar art activity and the hub of abstract expressionism on the West Coast. During this time, like his colleagues at CSFA, Diebenkorn explored the emotive power of abstraction. After a brief sojourn to Woodstock, New York, he joined the faculty at CSFA in 1947, a pivotal time for Diebenkorn, as he continued to explore abstract expressionism and to experiment with the effects of line in his work. After only two years, however, he tired of what Jane Livingston called “the heated and paradoxically doctrinaire environment of the school.”2 Diebenkorn moved to Albuquerque, where he continued to enjoy the benefits of the GI Bill, studying at the University of New Mexico. As Thomas Albright points out, Diebenkorn’s “early interest in figurative painting—and in Cubism—never receded far from the surface during the last years of the 1940s … They became even more prominent after he left the California School of Fine Arts in 1950 to spend two years as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.”3 Despite this underlying tendency toward representation, Diebenkorn did not make a decisive shift until several years later. When he did finally gravitate toward representational subjects, he experimented first with geometric landscapes and then with the human figure.

Created in 1963, Landscape suggests the concerns that occupied Diebenkorn throughout his career, but particularly following his stylistic transformation in the mid-1950s. For Diebenkorn, drawing often paralleled painting though it rarely directly informed his large-scale works. Many of the formal concerns of space, light, and structure in Diebenkorn’s paintings, particularly his extensive Ocean Park series, also appear in his drawings. In Landscape he depicts a city from a heightened perspective such that the horizon line lies at the viewer’s eye level, just above the tops of the buildings. Such elevated viewpoints “directly reflect Diebenkorn’s experience years earlier of flying over the Southwest, which inspired him to integrate bird’s-eye perspectival structure [and] also established the artist’s authoritative grasp of the distinctive nature of landscape space as opposed to interiors.”3 With its buildings assembled from geometric shapes and planes, the drawing also reveals Diebenkorn’s interest in geometry, foreshadowing his Ocean Park series (1967–93)—large, abstract paintings in which blocks of color and strong horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines commingle in dynamic compositions. Landscape also reveals Diebenkorn’s special attention to light and great care to assure that shadows and highlights create vibrant patterns of light and dark. His organization of the pictorial space also emerges as a key element—he successfully anchors the composition without sacrificing the feeling of vast space that permeates the picture. Landscape emerges as a prime example of Diebenkorn’s ability to capture the variety of textures and shapes that characterize nature, while simultaneously producing an arrestingly original artistic vision. —L.W.

1. By this time Diebenkorn had already encountered the works of Edward Hopper through a book he received while in high school. However, he became deeply enthralled with the older artist’s use of light and shade while he was studying at Stanford.
2. Jane Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998), 34.
3. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 65.
4. Livingston, 51.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922 and died in Berkeley in 1993. In the early 1940’s Diebenkorn attended Stanford University and in 1943, after enrolling in the Marine Corps Officer training program, he was transferred to UC Berkeley and later to Washington DC. Following his discharge in 1946, the artist enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts, a major pocket of postwar art activity and the hub of abstract expressionism on the West Coast. He joined the faculty at CSFA in 1947 and continued to teach there and at other institutions around the country for most of his life. His works have been exhibited extensively on a national scale at institutions including, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Diebenkorn’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among many others. The San Jose Museum of Art currently owns two prints and two drawings by Diebenkorn. This would be the fifth piece by Diebenkorn to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2005)

Born in Portland, Oregon; died in Healdsburg, California (Berkeley?)

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