Hello I’m Richard Diebenkorn. I was born on April 22, 1922. I’m from Portland, Oregon, but I moved to San Francisco with my family when I was two. In 1940 I started attending Stanford University and met my first two major mentors, Victor Arnautoff and Edward Hopper. Then I joined the United States Marine Corps and served from 1943 to 1953. I lived in many different places throughout the late 40’s and early 50’s. As I bounced around the country, I worked on my own form of expressionist art. I ended up in Berkeley, California in 1955 and lived there for 11 years.
By the the mid 50’s I had become an important figurative painter whose style combined aspects of Henri Matisse and abstract expressionism. From fall of 1964 to spring of 1965 I took a tour through Europe and even acquired a travel Visa to Soviet Russia to view Matisse’s paintings. I returned to the Bay-Area in mid 1965 and painted new works that summed up all I learned in the past decade or so as a leading figurative painter.
In 1967 I moved to Santa Monica and became a professor at UCLA. I then returned to abstractionism in the winter of 1966-67. I started my “Ocean Park” series the same year and worked on it for the next 18 years and ended up with 135 paintings in it. I then retired from UCLA in 1973, and in 1990 I created a series of six etchings for the Arion Press edition of “Poems by W.B. Yeats”. Then I died March 30, 1993 due to complications with emphysema.
By the the mid 50’s I had become an important figurative painter whose style combined aspects of Henri Matisse and abstract expressionism. From fall of 1964 to spring of 1965 I took a tour through Europe and even acquired a travel Visa to Soviet Russia to view Matisse’s paintings. I returned to the Bay-Area in mid 1965 and painted new works that summed up all I learned in the past decade or so as a leading figurative painter.
In 1967 I moved to Santa Monica and became a professor at UCLA. I then returned to abstractionism in the winter of 1966-67. I started my “Ocean Park” series the same year and worked on it for the next 18 years and ended up with 135 paintings in it. I then retired from UCLA in 1973, and in 1990 I created a series of six etchings for the Arion Press edition of “Poems by W.B. Yeats”. Then I died March 30, 1993 due to complications with emphysema.
Some of my Artwork
Friends and Artists who Influenced Me
My Art Movements
During the beginning of my career, I was a part of the abstract expressionist movement that occurred in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of the first artists of this form of art were inspired from the troubles in Europe and the American Great Depression. This art form was credited to be the first american avant-garde, and has been described as "American-Type Painting" by the famous art critic Clement Greenberg. However, I abandoned the abstract expressionist art style and started painting as part of the bay area figurative movement, which took place in San Francisco during the mid 1900s. Later on, I switched from painting figuratively back to painting abstractly in the 1960s.
Events that Happened in my Lifetime
- 1928 - first Mickey Mouse cartoon released
- 1929 - Great Depression starts
- 1939 - WWII starts
- 1945 - WWII ends
- 1954 - Civil Rights Movements starts
- 1969 - Neil Armstrong becomes first man on the moon
- 1974 - rubiks cube invented by Erno Rubik
- 1977 - first Star Wars film released in theatres
- 1982 - Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is released
- 1990 - the "world wide web" is invented, changing life as we knew it