Exhibitions

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series was the first major museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s most celebrated body of work, named after the Southern California beachfront community where Diebenkorn worked between 1967 and 1988. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, its only East Coast venue, featured more than 80 works, including large-scale paintings, smaller paintings made on cigar box lids, mixed-media drawings on paper, monotypes, and prints from June 30–September 23, 2012.

The video features the exhibition’s curator, Sarah C. Bancroft, and the Corcoran’s Chief Curator and Head of Research, Philip Brookman, reflecting on Diebenkorn’s powerful abstract investigations of space, light, and color, which evoke landscape and architectural forms as well as the sense of place that defined the California coast during this time.

Throughout his long career, Richard Diebenkorn kept a sketchbook—a “portable studio,” as he called it—to capture his ideas. These books span 50 years and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored, including deeply personal portraits of his wife, studies of the figure, landscape studies and compositions that point to Diebenkorn’s signature blend of figuration and abstraction.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed at the Cantor Art Center explored the relationship between his sketchbooks and his paintings and included loans of early works that Diebenkorn created as a Stanford student from September 9, 2015–August 22, 2016.

Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, daughter of Richard Diebenkorn, and Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press and printer and publisher of the artist’s significant work in intaglio, talk about the long span of years watching Diebenkorn at work and being engaged by his process. The lecture took place in the gallery during the exhibition Closely Considered – Diebenkorn in Berkeley from September 14 to November 16, 2014.

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.

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.

Produced on the occasion of Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1946–1952 (March 19 – August 21, 2020), a historical exhibition at Van Doren Waxter in New York devoted to the artist’s stylistic and technical origins and shot on location twice during the early months of the pandemic when the exhibition was closed to the public, the video features interviews with Daisy Murray Holman, Head of Archives at the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, The Morgan Library & Museum. Together, they ground the viewer in the artist’s early body of work, or as Federman says, “Diebenkorn before Diebenkorn.”