Richard Diebenkorn
Abstract, then figurative, then Ocean Park — Californian light held in geometry.
Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland in 1922, grew up in San Francisco, and made his name with abstract painting in the early 1950s before doing something almost nobody did in that decade: turning back to the figure, becoming a central member of the Bay Area Figurative movement with David Park and Elmer Bischoff. In 1967 he moved to Santa Monica and began Ocean Park, the series of some 140 large canvases and many works on paper that occupied him until 1988 — flat planes of light-filled colour, ruled and re-ruled, with the corrections left visible. He died in 1993.
Ocean Park leads the market by a considerable distance, and within it the large canvases are far ahead of the smaller works, though the gouaches and the acrylic-and-crayon works on paper from the same years are substantial in their own right. Diebenkorn left pentimenti and drawn construction lines deliberately exposed, and these are regularly mistaken for damage or for an unfinished state. He was also a serious printmaker with Crown Point Press. The Diebenkorn Foundation published the catalogue raisonne and is the reference for attribution.
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