Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn 1922-93, American painter, b. Portland, Oreg. Raised in California, he studied and taught during the 1940s at the California School of Fine Arts, where his approach to color and composition was influenced by the abstract painters Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko . He turned away from abstraction in the 1950s, developing a style that continued to use the dramatic forms and vivid colors of abstract expressionism while portraying recognizable subjects—landscapes, portraits, interiors, and still lifes. Diebenkorn and David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, and other Bay area artists became recognized as a California school of figurative painting. In 1967, Diebenkorn began his best-known paintings, the Ocean Park series, serenely geometric, color-saturated works in which landscape elements are only barely discernible.

Bibliography: See biography by G. Nordland (1987, repr. 1996); study by J. Livingston (1997).

Diebenkorn, Richard (1922–1993). American painter, born in Portland, Oregon. His family moved to San Francisco in 1924 and he spent almost all his career in California, mainly in the San Francisco Bay area; from 1963 he lived in Santa Monica. He studied and taught at various colleges and universities, including the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where he studied briefly and then taught from 1947 to 1950. His fellow teachers included Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, and under their influence he abandoned the still-lifes and interiors he had been painting and adopted an Abstract Expressionist style. In the mid-1950s, however, he moved away from the subjective emotionalism of this way of painting and developed a style in which he tried to apply the vigorous brushwork of Abstract Expressionism to studies of figures in an environment (see BAY AREA FIGURATION). Subsequently he moved between abstraction and figuration, his work in both modes making use of large areas of colour that owed much to the example of Matisse (whose work he admired in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1952). Diebenkorn's best-known works are a series of large pictures entitled Ocean Park, begun in 1967 (Ocean Park No. 96, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1977). They are abstract, but the light-filled colours suggest sky, sea, and sand; Diebenkorn said that temperamentally he had always been an abstract painter.