Richard Diebenkorn. Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker.
His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings.
Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim. Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life.
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr. was born on April 22, 1922, in Portland, Oregon. His family moved to San Francisco, California, when he was two years old.
From the age of four or five he was continually drawing. In 1940, Diebenkorn entered Stanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors, professor and muralist Victor Arnautoff, who guided Diebenkorn in classical formal discipline with oil paint, and Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work of Edward Hopper.Hopper's influence can be seen in Diebenkorn's representational work of this time. While attending Stanford, Diebenkorn visited the home of Sarah Stein, the sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, and first saw the works of European modernist masters Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse