Richard Diebenkorn

American, 1922–1993

BiographyBorn in Portland, Oregon, in 1922, Diebenkorn moved with his family to San Francisco two years later. He entered Stanford University in 1940, and enrolled at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco in 1946, where he met the artists David Park (1911-1960) and Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991). 5 His paintings of this time were first exhibited at a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1948. He was awarded his undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1949, and in 1950 he left San Francisco to attend the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he received an M.F.A. in 1951. In 1953 he returned to Berkeley, where he would remain for several years. In 1955 he was invited to participate in the Three Young Americans exhibition at Oberlin.

Diebenkorn's first figurative canvases appeared publicly in the landmark exhibition Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Paintings held at the Oakland Art Museum in 1957-58. Including works by Diebenkorn, Bischoff, and Park, the exhibition represented the first major public acknowledgment of the new Bay Area figurative movement. Diebenkorn's works were critically well received and he was hailed as the most important artist of the movement.

In 1966 Diebenkorn moved his home and studio to Santa Monica, California. He began teaching at UCLA that same year and remained there until 1973. By 1967 he had begun the Ocean Park paintings, a series he continued for decades. In 1978 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. In 1988 he moved from Santa Monica to Healdsburg in northern California, where he continued to create primarily small works, mostly drawings, until his death in 1993. His work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition in 1991, the same year he received the National Medal of Art.