Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park

Richard Diebenkorn, The Ocean Park Paintings critically reexamines the celebrated West Coast painter’s most compelling achievement. Jack Flam, Distinguished Professor of Art History at the City University of New York, carefully assesses many aspects of Diebenkorn’s eminent career – the struggle between realism and abstraction, the discretionary bounds of the actual versus the literal, the synthesis of seen versus felt experience.
Professor Flam, a preeminent Matisse scholar, particularly illuminates the historical sources of the Ocean Park paintings in regard to their relation to the original ambitions of modernism. In a career whose apparent contradictory nature has often placed this brilliantly dexterous painter at odds with any art establishment, Diebenkorn has profoundly persevered. The Ocean Park paintings – an ongoing series begun in 1967 – is the body of work most responsible for transforming Diebenkorn from a local painter of both abstract and representational renown into a prominent American artist of international prestige, whose work successfully embodies figurative and abstract principles.