Woman with Flower

Richard Diebenkorn

Part of the 100 Years of Art Exhibit

Born 100 years ago, Richard Diebenkorn produced a body of work whose beauty and mysteriously empathic nature has long attracted many devotees worldwide. He lived during the period of America’s great surge onto the world stage of visual art in the mid-twentieth century, working alongside the likes of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell, but forging a decisively independent style at multiple axes in his career. Diebenkorn was a singular and distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker who successfully explored various modes of expression, from his Abstract Expressionist canvases and the figurative and landscape works known today as Bay Area Figurative Art to his monumental, geometrically grounded abstract “Ocean Park” series. In honor of the artist’s centennial, museums throughout the Bay Area and nationwide are celebrating his life and art by installing Diebenkorn work in their galleries and sharing stories online. 

Join us today by using the hashtag #Diebenkorn100.

Woman with Flower, 1960, was painted during a period when Diebenkorn was living in Berkeley, California and was associated with other representational painters collectively known as the Bay Area Figurative School. Diebenkorn brings to this work the creative urgency of his Abstract Expressionist paintings in which brushwork is fast and rough. There is little descriptive detail; instead the figure is rendered in broad strokes of color, while the chair, room and window are composed of architectural planes of color. In this and other paintings of the period, Diebenkorn demonstrated the deep symbiotic relationship between abstraction and representation that has been central to modern painting since Henri Matisse.