Richard Diebenkorn

Born in 1922 in Oregon, Richard Diebenkorn studied at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Following service with the United States Marine (1943-45), he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Early in his career, Diebenkorn abandoned a representational style of painting, but in the 1950s came back to landscape painting. In the 1960s he switched back to abstraction. In this work Untitled, which belongs to his Ocean Park Series, one can see it as both an abstract or perhaps as a topographic view of his native Oregon or California.(this biography from the National Gallery of Art)Richard Diebenkorn was born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied art. He served in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945 and was stationed at Quantico, Virginia. Following his discharge from the Marines after World War II, Diebenkorn studied at several California art schools and graduated from Stanford University in 1949. He was painting during this time, and had his first one-man exhibition in 1948 at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor. He lived for a period in the early 1950s in New Mexico, and received a master's degree in art from the University of New Mexico. Later he taught art at the University of Illinois for a year, then returned to California, where he settled in Berkeley and became a professor of drawing and painting at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and continued to produce his own work. He died in Berkeley on March 30, 1993.