Richard Diebenkorn

(1922 - 1993)

Born in Portland, Oregon, Richard Diebenkorn became a key figure in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland) figurative and abstract school of painting.When he was two, his family moved to San Francisco. His grandmother encouraged Diebenkorn’s early art talent, and he remembered often drawing locomotives on shirt cardboards as a child. He was also intrigued with medieval heraldry and the French Bayeux Tapestries. Late in life, he reminisced about the tapestries: “The main events are central and in flanking panels above and below, dead men and coats of arms; dialogues paralleling one another, horizontally.” (C.Horsley).

In 1940 he entered Stanford University, where he studied oil painting with Victor Arnautoff and Daniel Mendelowitz. In 1946 he enrolled at the California School of Fine Art, where he met artists David Park and Elmer Bischoff. At the CSFA Diebenkorn was befriended by Park, both an artist and teacher, who was wary of some New York artists' ‘egocentrism’ that he found in ‘The Doctrine of Action Painting’ and Abstract Expressionism. Diebenkorn’s work from this period was first exhibited at a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1948. In the 1940's, Diebenkorn also traveled to New York, immersing himself in the Abstract Expressionist milieu, and becoming familiar with the works of Robert Motherwell, Bradley Tomlin Walker, and William Baziotes. In New York he also became interested in jazz, even to the point of taking up, briefly, the trombone. Diebenkorn received his undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1949, and in 1950 left the Bay Area to attend University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he received his MFA in 1951. While in New Mexico, he became fascinated with aerial vistas.