After spending two years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one in Urbana, Illinois, Diebenkorn returned to Northern California in 1953, settling in Berkeley and teaching painting at the California School of Fine Arts. Thus commenced one of the most productive and critically celebrated phases of his career, as he created dozens of broadly brushed abstractions featuring interlocking forms. To emphasize their relationship to place, he titled each Berkeley and numbered them in the order in which they were made. Berkeley #24, like many of the works from this series, seems to respond to the Bay Area environment and its distinctive, stepped topography, which the artist was perfectly positioned to observe from his home near the Berkeley Hills. Yet Diebenkorn resisted the limitations of such a reading. As he put it in 1956: “What I paint often seems to pertain to landscape but I try to avoid any rationalization of this either in my painting or in later thinking about it. I’m not a landscape painter (at this time, at any rate) or I would paint landscape directly.”
Details
- Artist Name: Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922-1993)
- Title: Berkeley #24
- Date: 1954
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 68-3/4 x 57 in. (98.4 x 144.8 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan
- Accession Number: P.1967.26
- Copyright: Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Object Information
Robert A. Rowan, gift 1967 to;
Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, 1967-1975;
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, 1975.
Seventeen Contemporary American Artists
- Expo (International Exhibitions Bureau) (1958 : Brussels, Belgium), 1958-04-17 to 1958-10-19
Bienal di São Paulo
- Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1955-06 to 1955-10
Loan to the permanent collection, Virginia Steele Scott Galleries at the Huntington_1
- The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 2009-05-27 to 2015-12-17
Paintings by Richard Diebenkorn
- Pasadena Art Museum, 1960-09-06 to 1960-10-06
Richard Diebenkorn Retrospective
- Washington Gallery of Modern Art (Washington, D.C.), 1964-11-06 to 1964-12-31
- Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.), 1965-01-13 to 1965-02-21
- Pavilion Gallery (Balboa, Newport Beach, Calif.), 1965-03-14 to 1965-04-17
Kompas IV: West Coast U.S.A
- Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1969-11-21 to 1970-01-04
- Dortmund (Germany), 1970-01-30 to 1970-03-15
- Kunsthalle Bern, 1970-03-28 to 1970-05-18
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1994-04-03 to 1999-08-04
Permanent and Loan Collection, 1974
- Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, 1974-03-16 to 1974-06-06
American Art of the 1950s and 1960s from the Collection of the Norton Simon Museum
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988-08-11 to 1994-04-03
West Coast Art
- Pasadena Art Museum, 1972-06-20 to 1972-09-03
Richard Diebenkorn
- Norton Simon Museum, 2001-12-14 to 2002-04-08
Alternate Realities: Altoon, Diebenkorn, Lobdell, Woelffer
- Norton Simon Museum, 2022-05-13 to 2022-08-22
- Diebenkorn, 1960, no. 16
Additional Artwork by Artist
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