RICHARD DIEBENKORN (Portland, Oregon, 1922 - Berkeley, California, 1993). Untitled, 1967. Charcoal on paper. With a drawing on the back. Work exhibited at: Richmond Art Center, California. Richard Diebenkorn Drawings, 1968-1969. -Acquavella Contemporary Art, New York. Richard Diebenkorn Drawings, 1996. Signed and dated in the lower left corner. Provenance: Private collection of the artist (1993, Acquavella Galleries, New York (1996) and private Spanish collection. Size: 43.2 x 35.6 cm; 49.5 x 42 cm (frame). The representation of women was a constant in Richard Diebenkorn's work, melancholic ladies whose identity is partially veiled either by an abstract conception of figuration or, as in this case, by a hat that covers their faces. As usual, the lady in this work is seated, slightly turned towards the viewer, a composition used by the artist on numerous occasions both in his drawings and in his larger works such as the one in the New Orleans Museum of Art entitled Woman on the Porch (1958). In this work in charcoal, a vibrant, energetic stroke resolves a scene charged with eroticism in which the viewer contemplates the protagonist. American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric and lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental in bringing him worldwide recognition. Diebenkorn entered Stanford University, where he met his first two artistic mentors, professor and muralist Victor Arnautoff, who guided Diebenkorn in the classical formal discipline of oil painting, and Daniel Mendelowitz, with whom he shared a passion for the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper's influence can be seen in Diebenkorn's representational work from this period. While attending Stanford, Diebenkorn visited the home of Sarah Stein, Gertrude Stein's sister-in-law, and saw for the first time the works of the European modernist masters Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. The beginning of America's involvement in World War II interrupted Deibenkorn's education at Stanford and he was unable to complete his degree at that time. While enlisted, Diebenkorn continued to study art and expanded his knowledge of European modernism, first while briefly enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and later on the East Coast while stationed at the Navy base at Quantico, Virginia. Diebenkorn had his first exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1948. The first major retrospective of his work was held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976-1977; it then travelled to Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Oakland. In 1989, John Elderfield, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of Diebenkorn's works on paper, which constituted an important part of his output. In 2012, an exhibition, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, travelled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Orange County Museum of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Recent major exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area include Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, July-September 2013, at the De Young Museum, San Francisco; an exhibition of small works, June 6-August 23, 2015, at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma; and Matisse/Diebenkorn, a major exhibition highlighting the influence of Matisses on Richard Diebenkorn, 2017, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.