Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
Richard Diebenkorn
April 22, 1922
March 30, 1993 (aged 70)
Exhibitions[edit]
Diebenkorn had his first show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco 1948. The first important retrospective of his work took place at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976–77; the show, then traveled to Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In 1989, John Elderfield, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized a show of Diebenkorn's works on paper, which constituted an important part of his production.[32]
In 2012, an exhibition, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.[33]
Major recent shows in the San Francisco Bay Area have included Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, July–September 2013, at the De Young Museum, San Francisco; an exhibition of small works, June 6–August 23, 2015, at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma; and Matisse/Diebenkorn, a major show highlighting Matisses's influence on Richard Diebenkorn, March 11–May 29, 2017, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Collections[edit]
Diebenkorn's work can be found in a number of public collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico;[34] Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii;[35] Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the de Young Museum, San Francisco;[10] Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,[36] Michigan, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.[37] The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University is home to 29 of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks as well as a collection of paintings and other works on paper.[38]
Recognition[edit]
In 1978, Diebenkorn was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture.[39]
In 1991, Diebenkorn was awarded the National Medal of Arts.[40] In 1979, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1982.
Art market[edit]
In 2018, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #126 painted in 1984 became the most expensive picture by the artist auctioned when it went for $23.9 million at Christie's New York. The previous record from 2012, also at Christie's, was Ocean Park #48 painted in 1971 for $13.5 million.[41][42] At a 2014 Sotheby's sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon's private collection, Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani bought Ocean Park #89 (1975), an abstract image of a sunset, for $9.68 million.[43]
Author William Benton made a painting in the style of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park for a friend who was a big admirer of the artist's work. At the back of the painting, Benton wrote a message signed with Diebenkorn's name. When the friend died in 1995, his estate was evaluated and an appraiser, not knowing the paintings provenance, marked the work as worth $50–60,000.[44]