This year marks the 100th birthday of American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993). In celebration of this centennial, we are spotlighting his critical “Ocean Park” series. In 1955, Diebenkorn ceased exploring abstraction, only to pick it up again eleven years later in 1967 after working in a more representational mode. This course change was prompted, in part, by the artist’s move from northern to southern California. Titled after a beachfront section in Santa Monica where he lived, the “Ocean Park” paintings encompass the hazy light and languid colors of Diebenkorn’s new surroundings. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret a work like Ocean Park No. 66 as only an abstract landscape. Rather, the composition responds to formal and aesthetic concerns and his receptiveness to the environment. In a 1983 letter to the Albright-Knox about recommencing the series, the artist wrote, “My concerns, as before, are with simply making painting yet the as always is the subject for landscape interpretation. This has ceased to bother me.”
– Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes, April 2022
