Arts and Letters

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn was born in 1922, in Portland, Oregon. Two years later the family moved to California, where he was educated and where he spent the majority of his life. In 1943, he married Phyllis Gilman. They have two children, Christopher and Gretchen, and are blessed with two grandchildren, Phyllis and Ben.

Next to his family, Richard loved drawing and painting in a way that only true lovers of painting understand. The sort of person who works at it knows what the outcome may be. Happily, his remarkable achievements have received the highest forms of international acclaim, and are able to be seen in museums throughout the world.

So it is amusing when some reviews referred to his work as "California Painting." I suppose that if one knows nothing about mathematics, he might actually believe there is no such thing as "California Mathematics." Of course, California is very proud to claim him, for he received the first lifetime achievement in art from the Governor of California.

He was elected to the Institute in 1967 and to the Academy in 1985. Last year he received the highest award in painting that a member of this institution can be given: The Gold Medal for Painting. This honor is given rarely, and former recipients included many of Richard's heroes: John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, Cecilia Beaux, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Willem de Kooning, among others.

Diebenkorn's works, like all fine works, develop out of a long and fruitful tradition of previous cultural enterprises. His paintings are inculcated with respectful acknowledgements, which he personally directs toward the high ideals that we legitimately refer to as art.

But probably in view of all the wider acknowledgements, the very warmest praise is evidenced by his wide and positive influence upon so many different kinds of painters throughout the world. And as one of his influences, I will reveal a personal opinion. Unfortunately, Richard is not here to stop me from what I am about to say. Those who knew him personally were well aware of his reluctance to use words to describe the language of vision, which is a language of silence. Picasso also warned us that people who try to talk about painting are usually “barking up the wrong tree.” All good advice, especially in these days of such linguistic glut in and around the present art scene. There are even those non-visual folks who enjoy referring to the eye as nothing more than a dumb organ. This fails to recognize one of the most important distinctions in painting—a difference between a trained eye and an educated one. This quality is rare and is qualified intrinsically when looking at what is there for us to see. In Richard's drawings and paintings, there exists a compelling force, a strong sense of physical empathy. This is evidenced by his sensitive probing of what is “near” and “far,” and what he finds and loses visually. And as he constantly and critically interrogates his own relationship in his compositions, he leaves for us some records and tracks of his ponderings so we participate with him by way of his anthologized process. There is further evidence of his thinking eye by his wise hesitancy and careful avoidance of the headlong. He questions the idea of a bottom line and reminds us of the folly of fixity. It is a sensibility that reminds us that both we and our world are not yet fully formed.

Richard Diebenkorn has left us a treasure trove because he is one of those rare painters who distinguished painting as an art by letting us recognize what we had not seen before.