Richard Diebenkorn

Previous owner: Artist’s estate; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, 2010; private collection, 2010
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Phillips, New York, 2019

Solo exhibitions:
2015
‘Richard Diebenkorn’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
2012
‘Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series’, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas
2010
‘Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings & Drawings 1949–1955’, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, USA
2008
‘Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico’, Grey Art Gallery of New York University, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia (D.C.); The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, Taos, New Mexico
1999
‘Richard Diebenkorn’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Group exhibitions:
2010
‘Collecting Biennials’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
1951
‘Master’s Degree Exhibition’, University Gallery of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Richard Diebenkorn’s painting is characterised by a fascination with landscapes. All the various places he spent his life – including New York, Woodstock, New Mexico, Urbana (Illinois) and Berkeley – have repeatedly found their way into his artistic work. As a young teenager, he travelled with his parents by train through the southern part of New Mexico and became fascinated by the landscape of the Chihuahua Desert. The artist moved to Albuquerque from Sausalito in 1950 with his wife Phyllis and their two children when he came across the University of New Mexico while looking for a postgraduate course. They moved into a caretaker’s cottage on a ranch outside the city near the Rio Grande. Over the next two years, he produced many drawings based on the landscape and of animals. Diebenkorn adopted the colour palette of red, grey, black and ochre tones from contemporaries such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and David Park, he layered the landscapes from individual fields of colour. Viewing the earth from a bird’s-eye perspective had a significant influence on the second part of the Albuquerque series. He experienced this for himself in 1952 when he flew to visit an exhibition by Arshile Gorky at the San Francisco Museum of Art. It went on to reinforce the schematic picture composition of his later work.

Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 at the age of 70 in Berkeley, California. In his obituary, the New York Times called him ‘one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California.’ [1].

[1] New York Times, 31 March 1993, Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: “Richard Diebenkorn, Lyrical Painter, Dies at 71.”