RICHARD DIEBENKORN

(1922-1993)

Untitled

Footnotes

This work is registered in the archives of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, Oakland, California, under registration number RD2315.

Provenance
Estate of the artist, California.
Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art, New York.
Private collection, US (acquired from the above in 1999).
Sale: Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Day Auction, May 12, 2016, Lot 120.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Exhibited
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., Richard Diebenkorn, May 12 - 31, 1979.
Zurich, Galerie Lawrence Rubin, Richard Diebenkorn: Abstraktionen, September 14 - October 31, 1995 (illustrated p. 31).
New York, Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art, Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park Paintings, February 18 - March 20, 1999 (illustrated p. 13).

Literature
J. Livingston and A. Liguori, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 4, New Haven and London, 2016, no. 4328, p. 253 (illustrated).
S. Nichols, Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective, New York, 2019, n.p.



The present untitled gouache by Richard Diebenkorn is from the artist's famous Ocean Park series, which began not long after his 1966 move from Berkeley to Santa Monica, and lasted for over a twenty-year period. Best known for this body of work—the largest in his entire oeuvre—Diebenkorn derived its name from the beachfront community in Santa Monica where he kept his studio. At the time that Diebenkorn completed this gouache, he was at the peak of his career, representing the United States that same year at the Venice Biennale.

This period represents Diebenkorn's return to abstraction after embarking on the figurative period that dominated his Berkeley years (1953–1966), after he had established himself as a formidable and key figure in West Coast Abstract Expressionism following a major solo show in New York and a profile in Art News by Herschel B. Chipp. The large, rectilinear forms that characterize the series began to emerge once Diebenkorn moved from a small, windowless studio in Santa Monica into another owned by Sam Francis on Main and Ashland Streets. The new space had large windows and was filled with light, the contours of which can be seen reflected in this series—it was this move that allowed him to finally abandon the figure for a time.

In many ways, Diebenkorn summons the inherent qualities of Southern California by way of the process itself. Drawing—as evident here in the graphite and charcoal—was crucial to Diebenkorn's methods, serving a formative purpose that connected his representational practice to an abstract one, all while marking his presence through a gestural stroke. It also gave the artist the ability to establish an underlying structure or grid. The flatness embodied in this series is also derived from a view of California from the air that he described seeing during a return trip to the West Coast following a stint in Albuquerque. Criss-crossing the land below he could see the interplay of manmade infrastructure on vast expanses of land, and which included waterways, valleys, and agricultural fields.

Diebenkorn often talked about the "open" and gritty nature of Los Angeles in comparison to Northern California as inspiring his new abstract stylistic development in the late 1960s and 1970s, as did the particular quality of light. Although he did include some figurative elements in his early Ocean Park paintings, by the time that he had completed this work in 1978, he had entered a totally non-objective mode, to which the "untitled" label also attests. He has even introduced curving lines in red and white, although the largely horizontal and vertical lines, intersected by the occasional diagonal, that appear in the under-drawing and scraped into the gouache itself determine its rectilinear character. The pentimenti for which Diebenkorn had become famous is the defining principle of its compositional structure. White borders, like the one seen here, are a common sight in this series, although—like this body of work more generally—it never takes any single, identifiable, and repeated form. In that sense, each work is unique.

Painted on paper, this untitled Ocean Park is typical of Diebenkorn's painting in the 1970s, completed after a long period working on large canvases. Beginning the year before this gouache was completed, Diebenkorn began showing at M. Knoedler & Co. in New York. He frequently exhibited works on paper like these alongside canvases, which Diebenkorn conceptualized as groups to be shown together, and whose sense of continuity had the effect of allowing one other to "cook" in a visual sense. Among the works "cooking" alongside this untitled Ocean Park gouache at the Knoedler shown at the May 12–31 1979 show was the oil and charcoal on canvas Ocean Park #111, now at the Hirshhorn Museum.