Donelson Hoopes and Nancy Moure American Art X: A Decade of Collecting 1965-1975 Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Los Angeles, CA, 1975, 248 pp.
139 Richard Diebenkorn
American, b. 1922
Ocean Park Series #49, 1972
Oil on Canvas
93 x 81 in (236.2 x 205.7 cm).
Signed and dated bottom right: RD 72
Museum Purchase, 1973
M.73.96
Collection: Marlborough Galleries, New York
Exhibitions: San Francisco Museum of Art, Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings from the Ocean Park Series, Oct. 14, 1972-Jan. 14, 1973, no. 14, repr. in color in cat.; London, Marlborough Fine Art, Diebenkorn, Dec. 4, 1973-Jan. 12, 1974, and Zurich, Marlborough Gallery, Feb. 21-Mar. 23, 1974
"Richard Diebenkorn rose to importance during the late 1940s and early 1950s while closely associated with the group of younger San Francisco Abstract Expressionists, among whom were David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Hassel Smith, Frank Lobdell, and Edward Corbert. Though Diebenkorn painted exclusively in an abstract manner in those years, he has said that temperamentally he had "always been a landscape painter.
"Diebenkorn's admitted affinity for representing what he sees found expression in the post-1955 decade in his well-known figurative cycle, and contributed to establishing the so-called Bay Area Figurative Style. The subject matter of these paintings is generally intimate and natural in spirit. Whether depicting a figure in a room, a fragment of an interior environment, or a landscape view, the works have a Cézannesque sense of control and structure combined with relatively broad brushwork.
"Diebenkorn continued working figuratively until he moved to Los Angeles in 1967 [?] and embarked upon the abstract Ocean Park Series, represented here by #49 from 1972. The title of this series, as in his earlier cycles-Albuquerque, Urbana and Berkeley -refers to the locale where the works were painted: the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica. The precise quality of light in any given working location has always been extremely important to Diebenkorn, and he finds its character here uniquely interesting, distinguishable even from nearby coastal locations.
"The Ocean Park paintings may be said to represent a culminative point in Diebenkorn's career. They represent not only a return to abstract painting but an unprecedented overall strength of composition and masterful subtlety of color. These works deal with the central problem of painting itself: those of spaciality and of the relationships between color; lateral, flat, and illusionistic space; and depth. Diebenkorn has sought in this series to capture what he calls, "the complete visual impression." He has allowed himself "to follow the painting in terms of just what I want for the painting, as opposed to the qualifying I found I had to do in figurative painting." p. 231