Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr. (born April 22, 1922 in Portland , Oregon, † March 30, 1993 in Berkeley , California) was an American painter.

When Diebenkorn was two years old, his parents moved him near San Francisco . In 1940 Diebenkorn began studying at Stanford University . At first, his style was heavily influenced by Edward Hopper's ultra-realism .

In the 1940s and 1950s he lived in many different places in America (New York, Woodstock, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Urbana, Illinois, Berkeley) and developed his own style that was close to abstract expressionism . The abstract expressionism had emerged during the 1940s in New York, which replaced as the center of the art world after World War II Paris. The works of Clyfford Still , Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning provided important impulses for Diebenkorn's painting . Diebenkorn became the leading abstract expressionist on the west coast.

From 1955 to 1966, Diebenkorn lived in Berkeley , California. At that time, contemporary painting on the West Coast differed from the work of New York artists mainly in its return to figurative painting. Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff , David Park , James Weeks , and later Joan Brown , Manuel Neri , Nathan Oliveira and others were part of this renaissance of figurative painting that was later known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement . Another important influence for Diebenkorn was the painting of Henri Matisse . In 1965 Diebenkorn even traveled to the Soviet Union to study Matisse's works there.

From 1967 on, Diebenkorn returned to abstract painting, but this time in a very personal, geometric style that was clearly different from his earlier abstract expressionism. He began his most famous paintings, the "Ocean Park" series, in 1967 and developed it into more than 140 paintings over the next 25 years. They are mainly inspired by the aerial photographs and perhaps the view from the window of his studio and are named after a place in Santa Monica , California, where he had his studio.

At that time, Diebenkorn was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles . In 1967 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters , 1979 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 1982 to the National Academy of Design .

literature

• Jane Livingston: The Art of Richard Diebenkorn. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1997, ISBN 0-520-21258-4

Web links

• Richard Diebenkorn at Google Arts & Culture
• Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (with multiple works)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Richard Diebenkorn. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 26, 2019 . 
2. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "D" / Diebenkorn, Richard NA 1982 ( Memento from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed June 20, 2015)