The Art of Richard Diebenkorn

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On the process of painting, American painter Richard Diebenkorn once wrote, "I want painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems ... the better." In part, he meant that the freest artistic expression was often the result of some sort of restraint. Much like Shakespeare writing within the rigorous poetic form of the sonnet, Diebenkorn found his format in the vertical, rectangular, human-size canvases that he used to paint his famed Ocean Park series, which occupied a large portion of his magnificent career and included many figurative works. This sequence consists of more than 100 paintings created primarily over the course of the 1970s. There is a tranquil, mystical quality to his works: geometric lines define fields of color evoking the tones, landscape, atmosphere, and quality of light in Ocean Park. His paintings thus hover on the boundary between abstraction and landscape.

This paperback exhibition catalog of the retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City contains a beautifully produced plate section, arranged chronologically, that spans nearly the entire second half of the 20th century. A special highlight are Diebenkorn's notes to himself on beginning a painting.

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Richard Diebenkorn: Revised and Expanded

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Richard Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. The luminous abstractions of his later career and the innovative figurative works of his middle years firmly established him as a master in the high tradition of modernism.

This revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive monograph on the artist presents a rich selection of the artist's oeuvre. Until the mid-1950s, he painted in the abstract expressionist tradition (synthesizing, as he has since, such disparate influences as de Kooning, Gorky, Hopper, and Cézanne) before turning (unfashionably) to figurative painting along with artists David Park and Elmer Bischoff. He then embarked on the series of large abstract paintings for which he is best known--each titled Ocean Park after the beachside community where he worked. Reminiscent of Matisse in color and Mondrian in geometry, these are some of the most remarkable accomplishments of twentieth-century art. The updated section of this edition follows Diebenkorn's career from the mid-1980s until his death, focusing particularly on his adventurous late works on paper. In each "phase" of his career, Diebenkorn explored the intricate interplay between formal rigor and luminous, sensual color with the same masterful hand.

Along with several hundred reproductions of the artist's work, critic Gerald Nordland provides a thoughtful and informative study of Diebenkorn's life and career, an updated, comprehensive exhibition history, and a selected bibliography.

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Richard Diebenkorn is an expanded edition of Gerald Nordland's authoritative study of the painter, first published in 1987 and now reissued by Rizzoli, a leading publisher of fine-art books. Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, long ago entered the pantheon of great modernist artists. He was an early abstract expressionist, then went through a less successful stage of figural painting. Abruptly changing direction in the late 1960s, he rediscovered abstraction in an extraordinary series of grandly conceived paintings titled "Ocean Park," produced over a span of nearly 20 years. With strong vertical and diagonal constructions serving as structure for large areas of fresh, lyrical color, the elegant juxtapositions and satisfying geometry of "Ocean Park" make it his masterpiece; almost half this oversize book is devoted to the series. Nordland's descriptions and analyses of the paintings, based on 40 years' study of Diebenkorn's life and work, guide the reader to a deeper understanding of the painter's intentions and achievements. The text is clear, straightforward, and largely convincing, though there is surprisingly little comparative material by other artists. Graceful, understated design that complements the paintings, and extremely sensitive color reproduction, make the book itself aesthetically satisfying and a pleasure to look at. This new edition of Richard Diebenkorn maintains the book's status as the definitive study of one of America's most influential 20th-century artists. --John Stevenson

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Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series

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This stunning exhibition catalogue celebrates in-depth for the first time Richard Diebenkorn's seminal Ocean Park works, serving as a major reference and a source of new scholarship on the series. As he traversed the worlds of abstract expressionism and figurative painting, Diebenkorn became one of America's most beloved postwar artists. The Ocean Park series, begun in 1967and comprising works in a variety of media, is arguably the most celebrated of his illustrious career. This book features beautifully reproduced works that radiate with color, allowing readers to appreciate the artist's evolving palette as well as his brilliant geometric explorations. The paintings, prints, drawings, and collages that make up the series are examined from diverse perspectives in essays that bring to light new influences and conceptual frameworks that reposition the Ocean Park series, as well as the artist's role in the history of postwar art. The result is a timely re-examination of a major body of work that will excite the numerous fans of this quintessential California artist.

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Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and drawings, 1943-1976

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This book is from a traveling exhibition in 1976-1977 that commenced at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. In addition to photographs of the works in the exhibition, the book includes essays by Robert T. Buck, Jr., Linda L. Cathcart, Gerald Nordland, and Maurice Tuchman. Richard Diebenkorn's work changed considerably as it evolved over the three decades represented here, demonstrating the artist's capacity for continuous self-criticism and awareness rarely matched by any of his contemporaries. This willingness to transform his images radically has been misinterpreted by some art critics who see these shifts as signs of weakness. The opposite is the case: Diebenkorn comprehends the nature of art at its most fundamental as a mutating, vibrant, and even evolving force contrasted to packaged and predictable presentations. An independent figure who understandably guarded his personal privacy and artistic integrity carefully, Diebenkorn nevertheless evokes in the art world-at-large reflections and feelings about California more than any other artist. Although he was the best known painter on the West Coast at the time of the exhibition, a position he had held for some time, Diebenkorn is a painter's painter.

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Richard Diebenkorn Small Paintings from Ocean Park

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Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico

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Internationally acclaimed artist Richard Diebenkorn lived in Albuquerque from 1950-1952, where he executed an impressive body of more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and welded-metal sculpture. Until recently much of Diebenkorn's New Mexico work remained forgotten. With his coming to New Mexico, Diebenkorn moved toward a kind of painting that, although rigorous and considered, emits energies of freedom, freshness, and spontaneity and has inferences of landscape. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of this New Mexico period, and investigates the critical role it played in Diebenkorn's exploration of the idiom of abstraction and the maturation of his art. It also demonstrates how New Mexico's desert landscape and light affected Diebenkorn's artistic route toward figurative painting and the landscape-inspired abstractions of his greatly acclaimed "Ocean Park" series. Companion to an exhibition to open at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, this book offers not only stunning reproductions of the artist's work but also important new research into the life of one of the creative giants of the second half of the twentieth century. It is published in association with the Harwood Museum of Art.

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