1954, Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #24 -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: After spending two years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one in Urbana, Illinois, Richard 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 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."
1954, Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #24 -- Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena)
From the museum label: After spending two years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one in Urbana, Illinois, Richard 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 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."