Richard Diebenkorn - Biography

Biography

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr. was born on April 22, 1922 in Portland, Oregon. His family moved to San Francisco, California, when he was two years old. From the age of four or five he was continually drawing. In 1940, Diebenkorn entered Stanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors, Professor Victor Arnautoff who guided Diebenkorn in classical formal discipline with oil paint, and Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper's influence can be seen in Diebenkorn's representational work of this time.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he lived and worked in various places: New York City, Woodstock, New York, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Urbana, Illinois and Berkeley, California. He developed his own style of abstract expressionist painting. Abstract expressionism had captured worldwide attention, having developed in New York during the 1940s.

Diebenkorn served in the United States Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945. After WWII, the focus of the art world shifted from the School of Paris to the New York School. In the early 1950s, Diebenkorn adopted abstract expressionism as his vehicle for self-expression, influenced at first by Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky, Hassel Smith and Willem de Kooning. He became a leading abstract expressionist on the west coast. In 1950 to 1952, Diebenkorn was enrolled under the G.I. Bill in the University of New Mexico’s graduate fine-arts department where he created a lucid version of Abstract Expressionism.

He lived in Berkeley, California, from 1955 to 1966. By the mid-1950s, Diebenkorn had become an important figurative painter, in a style that bridged Henri Matisse with abstract expressionism. Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Henry Villierme, David Park, James Weeks and others participated in a renaissance of figurative painting, dubbed the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

From fall 1964 to spring 1965, Diebenkorn traveled through Europe and he was granted a cultural visa to visit important Soviet museums and view their holdings of Matisse's paintings. When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965, his resulting works summed up all that he had learned from more than a decade as a leading figurative painter.

The Henri Matisse paintings French Window at Collioure, and View of Notre-Dame both from 1914 exerted tremendous influence on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings. According to art historian Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn saw both Matisse paintings in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966 and they had an enormous impact on him and his work. Jane Livingston says about the January 1966 Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles:

It is difficult not to ascribe enormous weight to this experience for the direction his work took from that time on. Two pictures he saw there reverberate in almost every Ocean Park canvas. View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both painted in 1914, were on view for the first time in the US.

Livingston goes on to say Diebenkorn must have experienced French Window at Collioure, as an epiphany.

In 1967, Diebenkorn returned to abstraction, this time in a distinctly personal, geometric style that clearly departed from his early abstract expressionist period. The "Ocean Park" series, begun in 1967 and developed for over 25 years, became his most famous work and resulted in more than 140 paintings. Based on the aerial landscape and perhaps the view from the window of his studio, these large-scale abstract compositions are named after a community in Santa Monica, California, where he had his studio. The Ocean Park series bridges his earlier abstract expressionist works with Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. He taught at this time at UCLA. In 1990, Diebenkorn produced a series of six etchings for the Arion Press edition of Poems of W. B. Yeats, with poems selected and introduced by Helen Vendler.

Richard Diebenkorn died due to complications from emphysema in Berkeley on March 30, 1993.