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The Exacting Nuance of Richard Diebenkorn

This Postwar painter and printmaker was a pioneer who turned his back on trends and the noise of opinion to produce a dazzling, deeply evocative body of work.

In the Golden Age of Air Travel in the early 1950s, people saw for the first time aerial views that revealed the delineated lines and rectangles of farmers’ fields. For Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), this geometry was captured in his early landscape abstracts, like his Sausalito, Albuquerque and Berkeley series. Loaded with vibrant color and acute angles, all of his work was informed by the architecture, texture of the land, the vertical and horizontal planes, curved and straight vistas, the Pacific Ocean and the dazzling clear sun. When other painters gravitated to New York as the happening place for art, Diebenkorn tried it for a year and went back west, where he stayed, painting every day for the rest of his life.

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From the early abstracts, he moved into figurative paintings during the 1960s. Female silhouettes, sometimes faceless, the figures are backdropped by blocks of color. Evoking subtle, pensive narratives, one woman drinks coffee,........

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