The Abstract Emotion of Richard Diebenkorn

[Pierre Tavlitzki]

The Californian artist whom I am presenting today is little known outside the United States, but his work is regularly placed in the evening auctions of Modern Art in New York.

Much influenced by the work of Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn waved throughout his career between figuration and abstraction. Faithful to the Western United States, he was an active member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which again showed the landscape beyond abstraction. Starting from 1967, in the series of paintings Ocean Park, the beauty of California remains the main driver of his work, but the figure disappears again.

The creation of a painting by Diebenkorn was a long process during which the artist structured and restructured the image, with increasingly tenuous variations, until he considered that the effect matched the emotion he wanted to express.

Unlike other paintings of this series which are nearly monochromatic, Ocean Park 117, painted in 1979, is enhanced with bright colors, blue and yellow. Areas of flat colors, more and more narrow as we look towards the top of the canvas, can be a landscape or a river or a pool, or just the atmosphere of California.

At Christie's on May 13 in New York, this painting of average size for the artist, 114 x 114 cm, is estimated $ 4 million.

[Pierre Tavlitzki]

Interesting and colorful, this painting has far exceeded the lower price that Christie's expected. It sold $ 6.5 million including premium. It can be considered as one of the most important examples of the Ocean Park series.