The Art of Richard Diebenkorn

E-295: University of California Press. Very Good. 1997. Paperback. Trade PB. 4to. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 1997. 276 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. Wrappers lightly worn with some light shelf-wear to the extremities present. Book is free of ownership marks. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. On the process of painting, American painter Richard Diebenkorn once wrote, "I want painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems ... The better." In part, he meant that the freest artistic expression was often the result of some sort of restraint. Much like Shakespeare writing within the rigorous poetic form of the sonnet, Diebenkorn found his format in the vertical, rectangular, human-size canvases that he used to paint his famed Ocean Park series, which occupied a large portion of his magnificent career and included many figurative works. This sequence consists of more than 100 paintings created primarily over the course of the 1970s. There is a tranquil, mystical quality to his works: geometric lines define fields of color evoking the tones, landscape, atmosphere, and quality of light in Ocean Park. His paintings thus hover on the boundary between abstraction and landscape. This paperback exhibition catalog of the retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City contains a beautifully produced plate section, arranged chronologically, that spans nearly the entire second half of the 20th century. A special highlight are Diebenkorn's notes to himself on beginning a painting. EB; 11.8 X 9.7 X 1.0 inches; 276 pages .