Richard Diebenkorn

Paul Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles
Virginia Sherwin, Piedmont, California
James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles
The Estate of John M. and Marion A. Shea
Christie's, New York, November 18, 1997, Lot 134
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

San Francisco, John Berggruen Gallery; Los Angeles, James Corcoran Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn: Early Abstract Works 1948-55, September - December 1975, no. 8
Palm Springs, Desert Museum, Desert Art Collection, March - June 1985
Newport Beach, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Highlights of California Art Since 1945: A Collecting Partnership, May - July 1987
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Richard Diebenkorn Retrospective, September-November 1992

Exh. Cat., Taos, Harwood Museum of Art of The University of New Mexico ( and traveling), Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, June 2007 -April 2008, pl. 46, illustrated in color and p. 28 (detail)
Hollis Walker, "Richard Diebenkorn Harwood Museum of Art, Taos," Art News, November 1987

"I think I was saying to myself in Albuquerque that OK I'm going to damn well paint what I want I'm not going to do this qualifying of my intuitive responses.... If grass green and sky blue and desert tan; if these associations come into the work that's part of my experience"  Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn's seductive Albuquerque 8 is a paramount example from his distinctive and acclaimed New Mexico series.  Executed in 1951, Albuquerque 8 is one of the unique works that carries the title of the desert location where he worked and which provided him with endless inspiration.  Numbered from one onwards, the actual number of these works will never be determined as an entire roll of canvases and drawings was lost in 1952 and a further roll was damaged so badly that it was regarded as unsalvageable.  The existing canvases from this two and a half year period mark some of Diebenkorn's most consequential and earliest developments in his Abstract Expressionist language and are remarkable and rare objects.

Diebenkorn moved to New Mexico in 1950 when he was in his late twenties to begin a master's degree in art at the University of New Mexico.  Already an established artist in his own right, Diebenkorn sought a new landscape and surroundings for inspiration for his art and attempted in an exceptional instance to break away from his solid California roots.  Departing from the comradery, excitement and influences of the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in which he was raised, Diebenkorn travelled a path that would lead him towards a quieter, more subdued scaled-down life.  The earthy, neutral tones of the desert landscape and the various tonal qualities of the soft, golden light were immediately adopted into his palette and reflected in his work.  Diebenkorn recalls his immediate impressions upon moving to this new territory, "I'd left all my influences in San Francisco.  I left my mentors.  I think I was saying to myself in Albuquerque that OK I'm going to damn well paint what I want I'm not going to do this qualifying of my intuitive responses.... If grass green and sky blue and desert tan; if these associations come into the work that's part of my experience" (the artist in Exh. Cat., Taos, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, 2007-08, p. 29).  As Charles Strong notes, "with his coming to New Mexico, Diebenkorn soon moved toward a kind of painting that, although rigorous and considered, emits energies of freedom, freshness, and spontaneity and has inferences of landscape" (ibid., p. 3).  This fresh environment invigorated Diebenkorn's art and it was here that he was able to create a distinct and individual body of work that would hold a defining place in his oeuvre – later deemed the 'Albuquerque' works. 

During this period, which continued until June 1952, Diebenkorn executed roughly two hundred works of art including paintings, drawings and several welded-metal sculptures.  These works exhibited a new-found freedom, heavy gestural line and earth-toned palette.  The rural Albuquerque setting near the Rio Grande River where the Diebenkorns settled provided views of grazing horses and cattle and Diebenkorn internalized these shapes and expressed them abstractly through various fields of color and looping lines.  As the artist reflected, "I think that has a lot to do with the Southwest because the scale is, [pause] there is something that really is kind of overwhelming and most immediate when one is there... It [the sky] seems immense there.  And Phyllis and I both had thought, well, we couldn't really live away from the water, the sea, too long, very long, so that [we had] the apprehension when we moved back there, that there'd be no ocean.  And well, the sky took the place of the ocean" (ibid, p. 4).  The continually changing light and color of the desert made both rich and subtle impressions on the forms and his color choices, and remembering an early train trip through the Southwest, he recalls having "had strong memories of an interesting landscape, a special light, and sharp blue skies" (ibid, p. 17).  Executed in both opaque paint and vaporous washes of color, Albuquerque 8 translates the light of his New Mexican landscape into color to realize his revived vision – later concurred by Strong "seen in the context of Diebenkorn's entire artistic career, the Albuquerque oeuvre, I believe, is pivotal in the development of his vision" (ibid., p. 3).  Diebenkorn himself also recognized that his New Mexico work represented a critical juncture in his artistic development - it was critical to his exploration and success in the domain of abstraction and provided a foundation for the strengths of his first mature artistic period which continued to 1955.  It also provides us with a glimpse into Diebenkorn's artistic route toward the landscape-inspired abstractions of his later greatly acclaimed Ocean Park series, where the multiple uses of line and the abstracted landscape quality, were all born out of his Albuquerque period.

Diebenkorn's abstraction derived from much improvisation, which was essential to his working method.  Relying solely on immediate instinct and working directly on the painting or drawing surface, without sketch or study, Diebenkorn let his unconscious guide his paint brush rendering an unpredictable result.  Diebenkorn recalls, "temperamentally, perhaps I had always been a landscape painter, but I was fighting the landscape feeling; in Albuquerque I relaxed and began to think of natural forms in relation to my own feelings" (ibid, p. 21).  As Gerald Nordland observes, "the Albuquerque works are in fact abstract improvisations in color and line, with intuitive reflections of landscape elements which slipped into the work because of the problem of maintaining continuity of form and space in the rectangle" (ibid, p. 21).  Moved by the artwork of contemporaries Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, Diebenkorn's West coast training and upbringing distanced him from the postwar New York art scene and contributed to his status as somewhat of an outsider, despite the similar formal qualities and close stylistic associations found in relation to both artists.  He admired the originality of their structures, the unpredictable color juxtapositions and the variety of weights and surfaces of their paint handling and the use of biomorphic shapes which are all elements adopted into his own work.  The paintings and drawings Diebenkorn produced in the time he lived in Albuquerque are powerful examples of Abstract Expressionism, equal in measure to those produced by the celebrated masters of the New York School and highly significant in the canon of post-war art.