Videos

1:04:23 2019

Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, the daughter of artist Richard Diebenkorn, shares her insights and thoughts on the life and art of her famous father. In this intimate and thoughtful discussion, Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant reflects on his personality, career and the environment in which he produced his exceptional body of work.

Introduced by Ben Simons, Director of the Academy Art Museum, Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant spoke as part of the Kittredge/Wilson Speaker Series, while Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 was on view at the museum in Easton, Maryland from April 26–July 10, 2019.

3:11 2019

Michael Zakian, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, in Malibu, CA, reflects on Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955. The presentation was special as it was the only Southern California venue for the traveling exhibition, and as Zakian has remarked, “Many of the early images, influences, and references that later defined Diebenkorn’s mature drawings and paintings began here in Southern California.” The video features rarely seen and beloved works on paper, paintings, and archival photography. Of the installation at the Weisman and its impact on the public, Zakian remarks that “it shows Diebenkorn’s genesis” and that artists “really have to go through a struggle” of testing and experimenting.

Organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, the exhibition was the first to solely examine the work Diebenkorn made nearly 25 years before his epic Ocean Park series. Beginnings featured approximately 90 works and focused exclusively on paintings and drawings made between 1942 and 1955.

4:59 2018

Katherine Van Kirk experiences galleries a little differently than your typical art museum frequenter. When she takes in a piece, her eyes are drawn to that patch of acrylic thicker than the rest of the paint, that unrelated fleck of color peeking through a crack line, that odd bit of texture mismatched with the natural flow of brush strokes. These details, so often overlooked, prompt Van Kirk to wonder if the work is hiding secrets underneath its surface.

Van Kirk, an undergraduate at Stanford University, shares her experiences of finding a hidden “underpainting” beneath renowned Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn’s work Window, part of the permanent collection of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

3:37 2017

Organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum, Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 was the first to solely examine the work the artist made prior to his switch to figuration. It focused on Diebenkorn’s stylistic and technical origins in oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, crayon, and collage, tracing Diebenkorn’s evolution from representational landscape, to semiabstract and Surrealist-inspired work, to his mature Abstract Expressionist paintings from the Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and early Berkeley years.

Accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly publication by Crocker Art Museum Associate Director and Chief Curator Scott A. Shields, the exhibition countered the prevailing notion that Diebenkorn began his career as a painter in the Abstract Expressionist style. In 2018, Beginnings traveled to The David Owsley Museum at Ball State University, Muncie, IN; and Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. In 2019, the exhibition was on view at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA; and Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD, through July 10, 2019.