Richard DIEBENKORN Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922. He grew up in California where he lived most of his life, and studied Liberal Arts at Stanford University. Later, at the California School of Fine Arts, he met and absorbed the theories and techniques of Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. He visited museums constantly, and throughout his career was an artist full of surprising diversity. Diebenkorn began his art career in the late 1940s, creating oils and prints which neither embraced nor worked against the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists. He absorbed this movement and worked it into his own style. The airy abstract works referred to as Ocean Park, and named for the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica where he had his studio, are some of the most contemplative and strongly composed works of contemporary American art. In his printmaking, Diebenkorn worked slowly and meticulously, and was skilled in a full range of traditional techniques including etching, lithography, aquatint and woodcut. The resulting works preserve the quality of the artists' hand and his traditional mark. His constant pursuit of new methods and visual inspiration won him recognition among printmakers and painters of his generation. The artist died in March of 1993 in Oakland, California having produced only about 100 editions in his lifetime. Diebenkorn's work can be found in a number of public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Philips Collection, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.
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