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During 1998-99, a retrospective organized by Jane Livingston circulated to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, the two museums that collaborated on organizing the show, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As retrospectives do, it offered many critics a chance to think about Diebenkorn's career and his accomplishments. As Kenneth Baker noted in the March 1998 issue of Smithsonian, Diebenkorn has long been regarded by many artists as an "artist's artist." From the 1940s through the early 1990s, the Oregon-born artist concentrated on one goal above all else: to create visual images that forced him to continually question the process itself. As his daughter Gretchen Grant points out, this could involve his pondering a seemingly finished painting for 15 years, then applying a small dab of color to it with the comment, "It's finished now."
Inspired by Matisse, Gorky and other predecessors, Diebenkorn wrestled all his life with issues of abstraction versus representation. His quest culminated in the dazzling "Ocean Park" series of paintings, named for the neighborhood bordering Santa Monica, California, where his studio was located. "There is nothing descriptive about the 'Ocean Park' paintings," writes Kenneth Baker, who is art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. "Yet we can imagine how old Santa Monica's geometry of white-and-pastel stucco buildings punctuated by windows and sloping rooflines might underlie the pictures' architecture of lines and erasures." As Constance W. Glenn observes in an article in the Grove Dictionary of Art, "The period of Diebenkorn's figurative work corresponds (with the exception of the last of the Berkeley abstractions in 1955) to his remaining years as a teacher in the Bay Area (until about 1966). With Park, Bischoff and other artists such as Nathan Oliveira (b 1928), William Theo Brown (b 1919) and Paul Wonner (b 1920), Diebenkorn became known as one of the founders of the Bay Area figurative school. He always resisted the notion of a ‘school' in any formal sense, noting that the artists involved simply enjoyed a close association, but he led the way in developing a unique northern Californian realism. Paintings such as Figure on Porch (1959; Oakland, CA, Museum) continued the fluid, horizontal landscape references of the Berkeley series, while they introduced a skeletal grid with elements, such as a solitary figure anchoring shallow space at a central point. The new colours—intense sunlit blues, greens and yellows—were those of the California landscape. After visiting the former Soviet Union in 1964, where he saw paintings by Matisse previously in the Shchukin Collection (now Moscow, Pushkin Mus. F.A.), he paid further homage to him in his use of arabesques and fusions of exterior and interior spaces."
Selected Bibliography: Paul Bonaventura, Richard Diebenkorn September 15 to November 1, 1992. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA: MOPA, 1992); Robert T. Buck, Linda L. Cathcart, Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and drawings, 1943-1976 (Bufalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976); Linda L. Cathcart, Richard Diebenkorn: 38th Venice Biennial, United States Pavilion, 1978 (NY: Internatinal Exhbitions Committee of the American Federation of Arts, 1978); Jack Flam, Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park (NY: Rizzoli Interantional Publications, 1992); Catherine Lampert, Richard Diebenkorn (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1991); Jane Livingston, John Elderfield, Richard Diebenkorn, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (NY: Whitney Museum of Art, 1997); John McEnroe, Jane Livingston, and Barnaby Conrad III, Richard Diebenkorn (London: Chronicle Books, 2003); John McEnroe, Jane Livingston, and Barnaby Conrad III, Richard Diebenkorn: Figurative Works on Paper (San Francisco: John Berggruen Gallery, 2003); Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn (NY: Rizzoli, 1996); Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn Graphics 1981-1988 (Billings, Mont.: Yellowstone Art Center, 1989); Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn Monotypes (Los Angeles: Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, U.C.L.A. 1976, Los Angeles, 1976); Phyllis Plous, Richard Diebenkorn: Intaglio Prints, 1961 - 1978 (University of California at Santa Barbara Art Museum, 1979); Andrew Robison et al, Durer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992); Mark Stevens and Kathan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Etchings and Drypoints 1949-1980 (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1981).
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Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993, Seated woman in armchair. Original lithograph, 1965. 100 signed and numbered impressions on BFK Rives (of which ours is n. 43/100). Published by Original Press. Most of Diebenkorn's etchings and lithographs are abstract; very few depict nudes. For a large selection of Diebenkorn's figurative work (mostly drawings and paintings), see Timothy Anglin Burgard, Steven A. Nash, & Emma Acker, Richard DIebenkorn: THe Berkely Years 1953-1966 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 122-39, 156-59, 170, 176, and 188-210. Recently one of Diebenkorn's abstract prints hit Please call or email for current pricing information plus buyer's premium at Sotheby's NY. His figurative work currently sells for considerably less! In Christie's May 1990 Contemporary Print Auction, a similar piece, also from 1965, sold for Please call or email for current pricing information plus buyer's premium. Another impression is currently available from a dealer for Please call or email for current pricing information. A strong and elegant work in excellent condition! Image size: 666x508mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
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