Woman with Flower

Richard Diebenkorn

Part of the J. Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora Collection Exhibit

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.