Richard Diebenkorn

Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills
Private Collection, Beverly Hills (acquired in 1958)
Betty W. and Stanley K. Sheinbaum, Los Angeles (acquired circa 1963)
Grant Selwyn Fine Arts, Los Angeles (acquired from the above)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1998

Pasadena, The Pasadena Art Museum, extended loan, November 1963 - July 1964

This painting is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a dark brown wood strip frame with gilt facing and a float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Richard Diebenkorn's artistic oeuvre was profoundly influenced by his surrounding environment.  Whether he worked in the desert of Albuquerque or the mid-America of Urbana, Illinois, the artist infused his paintings with the atmosphere that he lived in. Berkeley #67 is a masterful display of Diebenkorn's bravura brushwork, lush color and structural power that was in full force by the seminal year of 1956.  The golden light, shimmering colors, and hilly landscape of Berkeley contributed to Diebenkorn's most lyrical and rich paintings of which the present work stands supreme.  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Diebenkorn integrated a formalist sense of pattern into his paintings, based on aerial views and multiple angles, establishing a signature style of perspectival framework.  He observed the difference between indoor and outdoor light and the variety of textures and shapes which change dependent upon the time of day.  Ultimately, he created compressed scaffoldings for the space and light without forgoing the openness of the outdoors. The Berkeley series of 1953-1956 marks the apex of the development toward his distinctive visual vocabulary of abstracted space, just prior to a return to more representational work of the late 1950s. In Berkeley #67, Diebenkorn masterfully layered and stacked grand expanses of color and light in a heavily abstracted landscape of expressive swaths and geometric forms that would later be influential in his Ocean Park landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Diebenkorn had a gift for "drawing" with paint, and his wide-ranging palette and finely articulated ridges of paint are evocative delineations of abstracted landscapes.  As rich as these painterly passages are, the linearity of his gestures maintains the structural integrity of the geometric composition.  Crisply composed within the space of the canvas, Berkeley #67 is also a deftly arranged profusion of color from the fiery sun-filled sky to the lush pinks, greens and blues of the landscape. In the summer of 1956, the artist painted in a studio in his backyard and the intensified chromatics of the 1956 paintings are in sharp contrast to the more austere earlier paintings inspired by the desert of Albuquerque. Diebenkorn's great skill as a draughtsman and his innate talent as a colorist make Berkeley #67 a finely wrought gem of virtuosity.  He considered himself a traditionalist and welcomed identification as a landscape and figurative painter at a time when this could be considered retrograde.  His work synthesized a lifetime of observing his fellow contemporaries, including Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and attention to his predecessors, the great colorists, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. While he had mastered the vernacular of both the gestural school of Action Painting and the emotive spirit of abstracted color, he began to "mistrust" a reliance on their explosive expressiveness, and in 1957 stated, "I think what is more important is a feeling of strength in reserve – tension beneath calm." (Exh. Cat., Oakland, California, The Oakland Museum, Bay Area Figurative Painting, 1957, p. 12). Diebenkorn therefore sought a spontaneous mode that was entirely his own for conveying his atmospheric incandescence.  The power of color that suffuses the layers of Berkeley #67 lends the painting a luminous presence that extends well beyond the edges of its frame.  One experiences the painting as a revelation and a complete immersion in the creative experience of form, color, and space.  The perception and feeling for the viewer is one of intellectual richness and masterful ability.

As noted by Jane Livingstone, "By 1955, Diebenkorn had thoroughly solidified everything he had learned about abstract painting and was extending his knowledge in a number of directions.  In this period, which the artist himself later termed 'explosive,' he seemed capable both of new invention and sustained virtuosity... Diebenkorn's fellow artists plainly recognized the powerful force in their midst.  Recalling Diebenkorn's work of this era, Bay Area painter and sculptor Manuel Neri later commented, `...It was a type of painting we hadn't seen on the West Coast before...he brought us a new language to talk in." (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, 1997, p. 43).  Having arrived in Berkeley in 1953 too late for a teaching position, Diebenkorn was able to focus his energy into his painting, the full flowering of which was achieved in his backyard studio in the summer of 1956.  Berkeley #67 is a testament to the artist's immersion into his most creative period to date, one in which he achieved a fusion of painting with drawing, light with color, and structure with abstraction.  "Diebenkorn's art," writes John Elderfield, "both as a whole and in its parts, suggests discussion in terms of the relationship between abstraction (and the formalizing imagination of the artist) on the one hand, and representation (and the external reality that compromises his subject) on the other.  It seems not only to exhibit such a relationship, as all pictorial art to some degree must do.  It seems also to depend on such a relationship." (Exh. Cat., New York, The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn, 1988, pp. 16-17).

Diebenkorn's Berkeley paintings drew inspiration not only from the artist's experience of the California landscape from the ground, but perhaps even more importantly, from the air.  The perspective of a bird's eye view revealed an extreme visual economy to the artist while providing endless opportunities for new abstract compositions.  Diebenkorn had observed that "the aerial view showed [him] a rich variety of ways of treating a flat plane - like flattened mud or paint.  Forms operating in shallow depth reveal a huge range of possibilities for the painter." (Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, New York, 2001, p. 63).  The topography and varied vistas of the Berkeley and San Francisco area provided Diebenkorn with a visual vocabulary of heightened diversity and steep gravitational pull. In celebrating the lush and hilly terrain of Berkeley, Diebenkorn brilliantly combined the formal with the emotional - bringing together undulating topography with light and warmth in colorful luminous abstractions.  The later paintings from the Berkeley series in particular, like Berkeley #67, retain a greater complexity of color and scaffolding that betray no trace of contrivance, or any suggestion of restrictive thematic inspiration.  Like de Kooning, Diebenkorn's brushstrokes in the 1950s were agitated and directional, suggestive of the artists' gestural workmanship. As the viewer tries to divide both Berkeley #67 and Easter Monday into foreground and background, the intense movement skews our reading amid coloristic verve and excitement: we at once understand yet continue to question. The paintings are highly successful non-objective compositions, suggesting disciplined authority and rigorous economy of technique.

Diebenkorn often listened to music, specifically Mozart, while painting, and the sweeping power, inventive compositional structure and compressed excitement of the Berkeley paintings seem to echo soaring orchestral music as an inspiration.  Berkeley #67 is not a representation of landscape; rather it is a distillation of an environment inspired by the raw dynamism of northern California.  Gerard Nordland states, "Richard Diebenkorn has built his oeuvre around showing us how he sees.  He has drawn us into understanding how he looks at modern art and has made his own dialogue...[he] is a man of considered judgment. ... He uses his words carefully and seldom makes pronouncements.  When he does make a statement it is worked out, thoughtful, like his work.  One day in June 1986, sitting in his garden, he said carefully, 'Part of painting is physical.  Another part is intellectual.  The most highly prized aspect is intuitive, when it is operative.  The percentage changes with each painting.  There should be a balance." (Ibid, p. 225).  A fluid composition, Berkeley #67 epitomizes the commingling of Diebenkorn's painterly eye as it embraces nature, light and sweeping gesture of movement in space. Within the picture plane there is a brilliant assembly of aesthetics, and extending beyond the picture plane is the recognition of Diebenkorn's painting as among the highest achievements in Abstract Expressionism.  In the Berkeley series the artist solidifies a style that is entirely his own – his masterful painterly touch and unrivalled use of color distinguish him from his peers as well as his predecessors.