.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The soft, pastel colors and subtle light of a quiet morning on America's Pacific Coast coalesce in Richard Diebenkorn's Untitled, epitomizing the best qualities of his most celebrated series of paintings on paper. Executed in 1976, this composition represents the consolidation and refinement of the unique pictorial language that secured Diebenkorn's status as a key figure in Twentieth Century art. Produced over a period of twenty years, the extensive Ocean Park series shares a distinctive combination of abstraction and representation, geometry and gesture, tradition and independence and yet each work is wholly new, freshly improvised and infused with a particular light and atmosphere all its own.
The genesis of the Ocean Park series is well documented. On several occasions earlier in his career, Diebenkorn changed his style when he changed cities; he began to translate the American landscape into abstraction while he lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, during the early 1950s, and in Berkeley, California from 1953 to 1965. But the pictorial developments that occurred after his move to Los Angeles in 1966 would prove to be the most momentous of his life. Within several months of beginning work in his first Santa Monica studio, located in a neighborhood near the beach known as Ocean Park, the artist embarked on his monumental series of eponymous paintings and drawings, inventing a system of abstraction that sublimated his experience of the diverse landscapes of the ocean, beach and desert areas around Los Angeles into a rigid compositional strategy.
The genesis of the Ocean Park series is well documented. On several occasions earlier in his career, Diebenkorn changed his style when he changed cities; he began to translate the American landscape into abstraction while he lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, during the early 1950s, and in Berkeley, California from 1953 to 1965. But the pictorial developments that occurred after his move to Los Angeles in 1966 would prove to be the most momentous of his life. Within several months of beginning work in his first Santa Monica studio, located in a neighborhood near the beach known as Ocean Park, the artist embarked on his monumental series of eponymous paintings and drawings, inventing a system of abstraction that sublimated his experience of the diverse landscapes of the ocean, beach and desert areas around Los Angeles into a rigid compositional strategy.