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Artist or Maker: Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
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Provenance: Poindexter Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. James Denby, Washington, D.C.
Private Collection, U.S.A.
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Exhibited: San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings 1961-1963, September-October 1963.
Washington, D.C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, New York, The Jewish Museum and Newport Beach, Pavilion Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn, November 1964-April 1965, no. 45.
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Literature: H. Kramer, "Pure and Simple Diebenkorn," Arts Magazine, December 1963, p. 48 (illustrated).
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Notes: This work will be included in the forthcoming Richard Diebenkorn catalogue raisonné of paintings and drawings being prepared by the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.
Santa Cruz I, 1962 is a seminal example for the artist's work of the early 1960s. Evidence of his passion for landscape, as well as Matisse, it is one of the few major early Diebenkorns that remain in a private collection.
Diebenkorn's work, figurative and abstract, is an underlying geometry. Santa Cruz I's use of triangular shapes and diagonals organize a myriad number of details into a complex but unified whole. Borrowing a compositional device from Matisse, Diebenkorn's landscape view, seen over the edge of a porch, sets up a tension between the spare form and color of the porch and ocean sky versus the highly detailed and variegated cityscape.
Two figurative painters, David Park and Elmer Bischoff, colleagues from the California School of Fine Art, helped move the artist back to figuration. Inspired by the new challenges of representation, Diebenkorn flourished, creating some of the most celebrated paintings of his career.
The paintings from 1956-1967 were his first mature works not derivative of other artists--"In the past five years the artist has become increasingly independent of the self-discoveries of abstract expressionism...Diebenkorn has transcended the various influences which to some extent survived in the early work and has created a new art which has grown entirely out of his own life experience" (G. Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, Washington, 1964, p. 18).
Santa Cruz I dates from this period and is a compositional tour-de-force, pointing the way to his Ocean Park series which he would realize six years later. It's daring vantage point, with the limitless horizon of the ocean at the left, combined with a deeply receding perspective that climbs up the hill at the right, is an evocative and surprisingly accurate depiction of the California architecture of Santa Cruz. The empty patio and the landscape entirely devoid of a human presence, with the exception of the tiny, lonely figure at the extreme lower right corner give the painting a Hopperesque melancholy and stillness that recalls the artist's 1940's work. A defining difference is that now the entire surface is activated with loose brushwork, subtly modulated color and pentimenti (what lies underneath)--all indebted to Matisse--to create a richly nuanced surface, that is among the artist's best.
