Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades @ Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco

Richard Diebenkorn 

Prints from Two Decades

Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Through June 30, 2025

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Spade Drypoint, 1982

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Coutesy of Crown Point Press

I’m making my drawing in spite of the metal. I think I’m going to make a straight line, and it says, ‘Oh, no you don’t!—Richard Diebenkorn, 1962

Crown Point Press presents Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades, a radiant exhibition of prints made by the artist during a series of residencies at the Press between 1980 and 1990. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Crown Point Executive Director, Valerie Wade, the show takes place on the occasion of the highly anticipated release of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press, 2025), which includes new scholarly essays, more than 850 significantly scaled images, and a richly illustrated chronology of Diebenkorn’s printmaking years. The works on view in the Crown Point Gallery were created in the final decade and a half of the artist’s life, the “high point” in his printmaking oeuvre, writes Starr Figura, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. In her essay Richard Diebenkorn, Printmaker, she adds that the objects made during this period “rank among the most extraordinarily luminous and elegantly structured prints ever produced.”

Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was highly accomplished in printmaking and worked with professional print shops over a period of more than 30 years (1962–1992). Master Printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press published a selection of his earliest intaglio prints in 1965 as 41 Etchings Drypoints. “It was Crown Point Press in San Francisco and the intaglio print processes it offered that captivated him the most: etching, drypoint, aquatint, and related techniques for incising an image into a metal printing plate,” Starr Figura adds, which “provided endless horizons for his work.”

In 1980, the artist began his Clubs and Spades series of works on paper containing symbols and heraldic imagery that had fascinated him since he was a young person; the iconography appeared in his prints as early as 1963. A series of intaglio prints made at the Press in which he deployed clubs, spades, and crosses in the early 1980s is “the first occasion,” Starr Figura writes, “when Diebenkorn’s prints start to rival the saturated color, imposing presence, and painterly ambition of his paintings on paper.” Spade Drypoint (1982) evinces his love of the drypoint process with its aggressive lines, while a shimmering aquatint with scraping made the same year, Green Tree Spade, is remarkable for its vividness and texture.

Ne Comprends Pas and Oui, both from 1990, were made during one of his most productive residencies at the Press. Oui, with its floating, broken detritus, marked a return to reversal techniques, which he had experimented with nearly a decade prior in 1981. Emily York, in Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step (Crown Point Press, 2008), recalls that Renée Bott made an aquatint reversal of Ne Comprends Pas, which became Oui. “Diebenkorn mainly drew with asphaltum to make Ne Comprends Pas, a predominantly black image in which the drawn forms come through as the white of the paper. After finishing the print, he wondered what it would look like if the lines were dark on light,” writes Emily York.

The very experimental, geometric Passage I and Passage II were made during the same time as Ne Comprends Pas and Oui and were also created with the reversal process. Richard Diebenkorn added a strip of color to Passage I, as he did with his most celebrated print, Green, published in 1986 by the Press. “It wasn’t the first time that Dick had done that,” and “not a lot of artists that I’ve worked with have done that,” says Renée Bott, from a wide-ranging interview conducted by Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and featured in the volumes. “He kept looking at it and…it wasn’t complete to him without adding something.”

The exhibition culminates in the weightless 1990 etchings Domino I and Domino II which are, observes Starr Figura, “among the most richly textured and densely composed images that Diebenkorn had ever produced.” As Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park geometries seem on the brink of dissolving…there is the sense of familiar forms and structures being opened up, loosened, and softened.”

Special Film

A new and special film with the late Kathan Brown and Valerie Wade, and together with Andrea Liguori, Executive Director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Editor, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints, explores the artist’s history with the Press and the “golden era”of printmaking during the 1980s. Andrea Liguori, in a tender interview conducted with Kathan Brown in late 2023, unearths brightly hued paper scraps discovered during filming that the artist had used to construct an iconic print image. The film was produced at Crown Point Press by Matthew Pendergast and is now available on crownpoint.com and diebenkorn.org.

CROWN POINT GALLERY

20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

crownpoint.com

RICHARD DIEBENKORN: PRINTS FROM TWO DECADES

CROWN POINT PRESS, May 23 – June 30, 2025

Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault - Exhibition @ The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Breaking It Down 

Conversations from the Vault

The Phillips Collection, Washington 

November 2, 2024 - January 19, 2025

Arthur G. Dove

Flour Mill II, 1938

Oil and wax emulsion on canvas

29 1/8 x 19 1/4 in.

The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1934

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection

Sylvia Snowden

George Chavis, 1984

Acrylic and oil pastel on Masonite

49 1/2 x 49 1/2 in.

The Phillips Collection

The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2024

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection

Sean Scully

9.2.96, 1996

Pastel on paper, 40 x 60 in.

The Phillips Collection

Gift of BJ and Carol Cutler, 2009

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection

Renée Stout

Life Readings (For Nathan Lyons), 2017

Acrylic on latex on panel, 36 x 48 in.

The Phillips Collection

Gift of Sean Scully, 2020

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection

Richard Diebenkorn

Girl with Plant, 1960

Oil on canvas, 80 x 69 1/2 in.

The Phillips Collection

Acquired 1961

© The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Image courtesy of The Phillips Collection

The Phillips Collection presents Breaking It Down: Conversations from the Vault, an exhibition showcasing works from the permanent collection that emphasizes the museum’s historic and ongoing dedication to championing living artists. Featuring over 90 works, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture, the exhibition presents an in-depth look at artists who are cornerstones of the collection, alongside a growing collection of works by contemporary innovators. Breaking It Down employs the museum’s legacy strategy of fostering visual dialogues between artists across diverse styles, generations, and cultural backgrounds. Organized by The Phillips Collection. 

“The Phillips Collection has advocated for living artists from its founding, through early-career acquisitions, exhibitions, and direct financial support. Breaking It Down celebrates this rich legacy as we look to the museum’s future and imagine new ways to support the artists of our time,” says Vradenburg Director & CEO Jonathan P. Binstock. “We hope the exhibition will inspire guests and new generations of artists by offering a space for discovery, learning, and joy.”

From its inception, founders Duncan and Marjorie Phillips envisioned the museum as a place to test new approaches to collecting and exhibiting art, arranging works by aesthetic affinities rather than chronology or geography. At the core of this approach was their enduring support and encouragement of artists; the two nurtured vital relationships with many artists who today are mainstays of the collection. Over time, the museum developed what Duncan Phillips called “units,” or groups of works that survey an artist’s career or represent key aspects of an artist’s voice, vision, or creative development. The “unit” is the key organizing principle of the permanent collection, which enables the Phillips to convene artists in visual conversations, independent of any particular school or movement, with the hope of sparking new ways of seeing, experiencing, and understanding art. Breaking It Down explores these novel visual exchanges as well as connections between patron, museum, and artist.

The exhibition highlights several foundational artists from the collection, including Georges Braque, Richard Diebenkorn, John Marin, Sam Gilliam, Paul Klee, and Georgia O’Keeffe, alongside works by contemporary artists to showcase how more recently assembled “units” continue to shape the museum. Several acquisitions have their exhibition debut at the Phillips, including works by William Christenberry, Walker Evans, Sam Gilliam, Joel Meyerowitz, Sean Scully, Aaron Siskind, Sylvia Snowden, Renée Stout, and Joyce Wellman.

“The featured artists work across representational and abstract styles, with a personal language of expression,” says Phillips Associate Curator and exhibition curator Renée Maurer. “Well-known artists are juxtaposed with a growing collection of works, reinforcing the museum’s active engagement with living artists, several of whom are grounded in the D.C. community.”

The exhibition also examines creative exchange between artists across generations and the museum’s role in fostering these connections. Works by Richard Diebenkorn and Kate Shepherd are shown alongside examples by Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, respectively. Matisse and Mondrian served as guideposts for the younger artists who ventured into new chapters of artmaking upon responding to the works in the collection. Dedicated galleries spotlight the Phillips’s early support of artists such as Georges Braque; Arthur G. Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe of the Stieglitz Circle; Augustus Vincent Tack; Sam Gilliam, whose work the museum was the first in the US to acquire; and Paul Klee, whose narrative imagery remains a source of inspiration and study for artists such as Joyce Wellman. The vibrant expression of works by Sylvia Snowden and Wellman conveys the power of color, which is a driving force of the permanent collection more broadly.

The exhibition includes archival materials, including letters, photos, and other ephemera, to contextualize the relationships between the artists and patrons Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, foregrounding the stories that are foundational to The Phillips Collection’s ethos and that inspire its future

ARTISTS: Karel Appel, Georges Braque, Sharon Core, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Paul Cezanne, William Christenberry, Arthur G. Dove, Richard Diebenkorn, Walker Evans, Sam Gilliam, Sadakichi Hartmann, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Paul Klee, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Joel Meyerowitz, Piet Mondrian, Georgia O’Keeffe, Lucy T. Pettway, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Sean Scully, Kate Shepard, Toko Shinoda, Aaron Siskind, Sylvia Snowden, Afred Stieglitz, Renée Stout, Augustus Vincent Tack, Joyce Wellman

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON DC

1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009

phillipscollection.org

Artist Richard Diebenkorn Exhibition @ Van Doren Waxter, New York - "Figures and Faces" - Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Richard Diebenkorn

Figures and Faces

Van Doren Waxter, New York

May 2 – June 28, 2024

RICHARD DIEBENKORN in the Stanford Studio, 

Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., 1963.

Photograph by Leo Holub 

Courtesy Estate of Leo Holub

“With the small paintings of heads, I would like the expression of the whole surface to be felt as the nature of the subject's character (as opposed to the facial expression and the facial form presenting the character).” – Richard Diebenkorn

Van Doren Waxter presents Richard Diebenkorn: Faces and Figures on view at the gallery’s 1907 townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the exhibition includes a sweep of taut, psychologically complex portraits made during the distinguished American painter, draftsman, and printmaker’s mature representational period, an output that Jane Livingston, writing in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, remarks “exceeds in number that of almost every other group of drawings and paintings he made, even in the prolific Ocean Park period.” The artist has been represented by Van Doren Waxter since its founding 25 years ago in 1999, with the gallery’s inaugural exhibition devoted to his paintings from his epic Ocean Park cycle.

The presentation includes seven paintings and fourteen works on paper made by the artist between 1955 and 1967, including a rare acrylic painted on a 1964 poster promoting the artist's drawing exhibition at Stanford University Art Gallery that year. A must-see for aficionados of Richard Diebenkorn, the show marks the first time his rarely seen Two Nudes, 1960—a beguiling, seven foot tall oil that anticipates the scale of the monumental Ocean Park abstractions he would begin in 1967—has been on view in 60 years. “A meandering blue background,” enthuses art historian Stephanie Lebas Huber in the show’s accompanying essay, “sculpts the figural pair by cutting into the flesh-tones with layers of blue, in some cases even defining their bodies with a contour line of the same hue.” Huber writes that Henri Matisse’s “long-standing influence over Diebenkorn’s color palette and subject matter is evident,” noting that he  began looking at the painter in the 1940s during trips to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and had viewed a 1952 Matisse retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art that included his hero’s coloristic Male Model, c. 1900 and the sublime The Dance, 1909.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Girl with Glasses (CR no 3358), 1963 

Oil on canvas, 14 3/4 x 10 7/8 in (37.5 x 27.6 cm)

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

 

A young Richard Diebenkorn and his family returned from living in the southwest, midwest, and briefly, New York City, to California in 1953, which “allowed the artist to see with fresh eyes a familiar structure that centered itself on a perpetual state of becoming,” writes Huber, “...the flicker of an eye, or the turn of a nose drawn from the immediacy of his intuitive brushwork.” In the enigmatic 1963 oil, Girl with Glasses, which was most recently reproduced in the monograph Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective (Rizzoli, 2019), “the subject’s helmet-like mass of hair is lacquered in a grey glaze; her black lenses are blotted out by an abbreviated reflection.” The artist’s indelible figures from this period “stand behind masks,” Huber suggests, but “occasionally the figure penetrates the mask,” as in the 1958 canvas Head (Portrait of a Friend), in which “the sitter’s eyes appear open and accessible beneath a shelf of violet; the mask seems to be coming loose, no longer integral to the face.”

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

David Park on a Hot Day (CR no. 2083), 1956 

Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 17 in ( 34.9 x 43.2 cm)

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation 

Courtesy Van Doren Waxter

A glowing portrait of David Park on a Hot Day, 1956, was painted a year after he and the Bay Area Figurative legend formed a weekly drawing session from the live model. “A sun that is felt but not seen cuts through the fog,” Huber asserts of the oil. “The atmospheric temporality transforms Park, bleaching the sitter’s torso.” In his lifetime, Richard Diebenkorn remarked of his close friend, “he was the complete painter, besides which he had a first rate mind—critically, intellectually, ethically—and he had a strong, if quirky, sense of and appreciation for people which begins to explain his power with human figures.”

The exhibition includes several arresting examples of the artist’s nudes, a subject matter so relentless for the artist that Livingston in the catalogue raisonné described him as “tireless, exhaustive, in his life drawing of the human body.” An emotionally charged and visually electric charcoal and ink on paper (c. 1955–67) depicts a female nude figure seated on a chair with a leg crossed, and prefigures the lyrical geometry that is to come in the artist’s eventual return to abstraction.

The widow of Richard Diebenkorn, the late Phyllis Diebenkorn, entrusted the stewardship of the artist’s legacy to the gallery in 1999. Then Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park Paintings, took place at its former home at 730 Fifth Avenue. John Van Doren and Dorsey Waxter later formed Van Doren Waxter on the piano nobile of a converted historic townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street designed to privilege art and the viewing experience. Together with the family of the artist and ultimately, the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, Van Doren Waxter has contributed to the study and understanding of the artist through a twenty-five year arc of exhibitions, programs, and fresh scholarship of every period, medium, and body of work. More recently in 2020, the gallery mounted an exhibition devoted to the artist’s early stylistic and technical origins in oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, crayon, and collage that had never been shown in the Northeast and served as host for the debut of the artist’s monograph, Richard Diebenkorn: A Retrospective (Rizzoli, 2019). And with a special loan of archival material from the Foundation, a sumptuous retrospective of the artist's work on paper took place during Diebenkorn’s centennial celebration across all floors of the gallery that included rarely seen drawings evincing his love of mark marking and use of paper as a medium.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922. He attended Stanford University from 1940 to 1943 and was awarded his Bachelor of Arts in 1949. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley in 1943 and attended California School of Fine Arts in 1946. He received his Master of Arts from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. The artist’s earliest abstractions were made while he lived in Sausalito, California (1946–1949), Albuquerque (1950–1952) and Urbana, Illinois (1952–1953). In 1953 he moved to Berkeley, continuing his work in abstraction. The year 1955 marks the beginning of a period of more than a decade that the artist worked from direct observation making figurative works from a model, along with still lifes, landscapes, and interiors. From 1966 to 1988 he lived in Santa Monica, taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1973, and began his Ocean Park cycle in 1967. He moved to Healdsburg, California in 1988 where he worked exclusively on drawings and prints until his death in 1993.

Recent museum exhibitions include Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed (2015–2016), Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Matisse/Diebenkorn (2016–2017), organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942–1955 (2017–2019), organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, which traveled to David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; and Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press), the definitive resource of the artist’s sketches; drawings; paintings on paper, board, canvas; and sculptural objects, was published in 2016. Forthcoming in 2025, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press) will be the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s printmaking output spanning 1946 to 1992.

Richard Diebenkorn: Faces and Figures

Exhibition Catalogue

Published by Van Doren Waxter, 2024

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

vandorenwaxter.com