Richard Diebenkorn: Three Works on Paper in the MFAH Collection February 8–April 10, 2011
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1972, acrylic, gouache, wash, pasted paper, and charcoal on paper. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund and gift of an anonymous donor.
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1984, gouache, crayon, charcoal, and pasted paper on paper. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund and gift of an anonymous donor.
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1971, acrylic, charcoal, crayon, and pencil on paper. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund and gift of an anonymous donor.
This small, focused selection of three works on paper and one painting offers an intimate glimpse of the work of Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993). Diebenkorn was an important 20th-century American artist associated first with Abstract Expressionism, and later with the Bay Area Figurative Movement. About 1967, his work began to focus on abstracted aerial landscapes, such as the painting Ocean Park #124. Diebenkorn earned international acclaim for his Ocean Park series, named after a community near Santa Monica, California, where he lived and worked for the next 25 years.
As an integral part of his creative process, Diebenkorn’s works on paper conversed visually and conceptually with his Ocean Park paintings. Untitled (1971) demonstrates his emphasis on the balance between linear elements and luminous areas of color, as seen through a view from a window or railing. Only a year later, he dissolved spatial distinctions in his austere Untitled triptych (1972). Then, in his paintings and drawings of 1984 and 1985, Diebenkorn heightened the ambiguity of space, using elements of collage to add lyricism while maintaining structure.