NEW MEXICO AND DIEBENKORN

A pivotal point in a young artist's career

A Research Paper by Ericka N. Patterson

The Kansas City Art Institute

November 2014

In 1950 a new graduate student arrived at the doors of the University of New Mexico. Under the G.I. Bill, West coast artist Richard Diebenkorn was able to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico to pursue his M.F.A. in painting at UNM. Diebenkorn was by no means an ordinary student, having already held a teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco; this move was a testament to his dedicated yearning for discovery through painting and drawing. In the following text, I will argue the crucial pivotal nature that the time spent in New Mexico had on his career while exploring working modes and final pieces from in and around this short period. While in Woodstock and San Francisco, Diebenkorn built up an arsenal containing perceptual practice, receptivity, reflection, and synthesis. A pertinent change in his work occurred with momentous and persistence effects when he was then able to manipulate and free this arsenal from its contextual shackles whilst living in Albuquerque. In New Mexico, his receptive nature was able to abound, it was no longer diluted by a certain preconceived establishment but rather attuned to the particulars of his surroundings and his vision. The significance the New Mexico period had on Diebenkorn, from 1950 to 1951, not only held long lasting effects on the content and infrastructure of his work, but it also presented a time of amplitude in his exposure and place as a professional artist.

Richard Diebenkorn was born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon. The family moved two years later to San Francisco where Diebenkorn grew up an only child. He entered adulthood at the climactic time of World War II, and was enrolled at Stanford University in 1940, three years after which he would be enlisted in the Marines Corps. Diebenkorn did not begin to study in the fine art department until his third year at Stanford, where in which he studied under Daniel Mendelowitz and Victor Arnautoff. Before this change in focus, in his first two years at Stanford, he studied literature, history, and music. He developed a deep-rooted and consistent passion for such subjects. After Enlisting in 1943, Diebenkorn moved around to an extent that exposed him to the east coast scene and art collections. He was first transferred for a semester of duty at the University of California at Berkeley and, after a short training stint in North Carolina, he was assigned to the Quantico base in Virginia. While in Virginia, only 30 miles from Washington DC, he could become acquainted with the Phillips collection. Gerald Nordland, a scholar authoring multiple essays involving Diebenkorn, brings to light the immense importance of a certain piece by Matisse belonging to this collection titled The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, 1916 [Image 1]. Nordland states that "The young man's vision could hardly have been better influenced than by this masterful document of figurative modernism", this gives precedent to Diebenkorn's immense interest in how this painting engages not only the real space of a studio but involves a controlled manipulation of abstraction that is exercised in pictorial invention and formal qualities while revealing open corrections throughout the painting process.[1]

Diebenkorn's interest in such a synthesis reveals itself throughout his oeuvre but comes to staggering light while entering his New Mexico period. The amalgamation through abstraction is evident in Diebenkorn's piece titled Albuquerque (Motorcycle Wreck) from 1951 [Image 2]. The nude and buff tones residing in the bottom half of this piece are rendered with broken brushstrokes as well as a serosity of thinned paint that culminate in a roughness related to the worn landscape of the desert. Although aglow, this swatch of color resides within the borders as a structural form, implying a sense of separation (thus distance) before two circles above it appear with a sense of urgency. This urgency is shown through an immediacy of mark with the white paint and is simultaneously altered and emphasized with the employment of a thin black encirclement. With the left circle making fluid contact with the gray horizontal line above it, and the right circle squashed to create a slight diagonal with the beige below it, a tension is created between a flat plane and spacial propinquity. This tension is further played upon with the introduction of a strong diagonal originating above the left circle. This diagonal is created through the absence of white, that implies a point de fuite. This point is further congealed with a certain gradient of tone that becomes darker as one moves up the canvas and the formal argument that the bottom half of the painting acts as a repoussoir.  A pertinent factor within this piece lies in the artist’s ability to produce a sense of space and proximity without rendering a scene that relies on mathematical perspective. Diebenkorn was indeed indebted to an infrastructure of abstracted pictorial invention and formal manipulation within Matisse's The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, it was however broad. The impressiveness lies in his ability to coalesce his concernment of such factors with the particulars of his own vision. With abstract terms that simultaneously reflect space and certain tangibility while including the correspondence of light, Diebenkorn breached a fusion that was wholly his own in New Mexico.

The bourn of the previous comparison is not to compare Matisse and Diebenkorn but rather to situate some of his most fundamental objectives and show how the freedom and unrestricted arena offered to him in New Mexico proved to be excitingly conducive to those concerns. A Review written by David Carrier in 1997 in light of Diebenkorn's show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, observes through a retrospective lens that Diebenkorn's "…essential attitude never changed. His concern always was to achieve equilibrium, a moment when his image of the subject - whether it be a landscape, perhaps depicted abstractly, or the model or still-life objects - became harmoniously satisfying. [His] relation to his subjects resembles a conversation between two friends". [2] As will be contended in greater detail, this open and amiable conversation with his subjects of interest grew unhindered in New Mexico due to his separation from both the east coast (New York) movement and the circle of artists he was involved with in San Francisco at the time.

After Diebenkorn's return from duty in the Marine Corps in 1946, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in order to pursue his art education in a more rigorous and concentrated manner. Here he was working under the professorship of David Park, whom later would become his colleague and friend.  Diebenkorn began to be regarded as a promising student, and after receiving the Albert Bender Award, a grant intended to provide for a year's independent travel, he and his family moved to Woodstock, New York, where he spent nine months working tirelessly in the studio.[3] The time spent in Woodstock was surely one of intensity, surrounded by the heavy breath and provocative influences of the New York art scene. This nine-month period gave Diebenkorn a moment to coalesce artists, ideas, and elements of work that he had studied in a fragmented manner while in the Marine Corps. Gerald Nordland says of Diebenkorn in Woodstock "[He] was confirming in practice much of what he had learned in the last five years, consolidating his own discoveries and insights, making his own criticisms and drawing his own conclusions."  I argue that this period was indeed important in the development of a conscious and rigorous studio practice. However, I maintain that in Woodstock, his receptiveness was directed upon an existing scene and provenance of art and artists and the attitudes of the time and place. Thus, his personally authored conclusions, while significant in their own right, fell under a cloak that remained bounded to the east coast art world. An example of this resides in Diebenkorn's piece Untitled (Magicians Table) from 1947 [Image 3]. Here one sees a tie to the aesthetics of Picasso; existing in a quasi post-cubism limbo, Diebenkorn seems to be navigating some elemental object that resides in flattened space and whose facets reign over a skewed sense of perspective. While holding wonderful tension amongst the edges and a complexity of intrusions involving line and swatches of value, the piece is distanced from Diebenkorn's later and more successful works by a lack of freedom and improvisation.

Upon returning to San Francisco, Diebenkorn took the position of Junior Professor at CSFA where both colleagues and trusted students gave analeptic criticism to Diebenkorn in light of this stifled vision. Referencing conversations had amongst Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park, Maurice Tuchman asserts that "After his return from Woodstock, [Diebenkorn's work] was regarded as 'too stiff,' with 'baggage that was over-structuring' and overly derivative from cubism."[4] Diebenkorn saw an increase in G. I. bill students eager to explore new ideas, he saw the school as having a "really quite a marvelous activity", and noted a shift of emphasis from still life and figurative work to abstract art.[5] In an article titled Between Friends: Still and the Bay Area, Peter Selz comments on San Francisco and New York within the context of art. Selz states that similarities lie amongst the two, applying to both the attitude, that to paint was an act of revelation and heroic portend in a search for a personal and individual style. He argues, however, "San Francisco art was less encumbered than New York art…it had less art culture to build on…San Francisco artists were less involved in 'painting problems.' Their work was wilder, less refined, less organized, less intellectual, less concerned with surrealist metaphor. It was more sensual, more organic, more directed toward nature".[6] Selz is not hesitant to add that "to paint abstractly was really not a matter of choice for young San Francisco artists: it was what everyone was doing. In 1949 the entire San Francisco Annual was totally abstract, which could hardly be said of that year's Whitney Annual".[7] Whilst more conditioning of the freedom and improvisation he would apply in New Mexico, California still held certain precedents. The restraints that San Francisco had on Diebenkorn were sometimes in the collective attitude, but there was also unavoidable influence and consciousness of personal friends and colleagues. While these associations where pertinent and provided for a rich web of reference and rapport, they intruded upon a vulnerability and freshness of conversation between painting and artist that Diebenkorn may have sensed was lacking. Whether the weight of these criterions where pushing on him or on his paintings, the decision to move to New Mexico, and to do so as a pupil, was made. 

The deliberate and determined move to New Mexico attests to Diebenkorn's dedication and intrigue within his practice and art education. As an active decision on his part to change his context and separate himself from asserted postulates and baggage, and his willingness to disrupt comfort as a means to progress, Diebenkorn asserts an evident importance in his personal vision. The New Mexico period is not only resounding because of the separation and the particulars its landscapes provided to the artist, but holds a sincerity and clarity of what it means to search for something. When asked to reflect on his decision to transition from San Francisco to Albuquerque, Diebenkorn stated: "…I could sort of sense that it wasn’t going to be long for us there. Also…there was a kind of line to be toed, and this bugged me a little bit. I wanted to get away and look at myself and do my own assimilation, and so that was another reason for going…"[8] As a teacher at CSFA, Diebenkorn had strived to instill a sense of discovery that pertained directly to the work. He valued the search in a painting that involved the artist and their experience with it, he regarded the result, manifesting itself as unexpected, as something to be celebrated.[9] Mark Lavatelli quotes Diebenkorn as explaining  "I think I was saying to myself in Albuquerque that…I'm not going  to do this qualifying of my intuitive responses…If  grass green and sky blue and desert tan; if these associations come into the work that's part of my experience."[10] The free exploration that Diebenkorn so valued directly in the painting process, separated from the need to equip his intuition, now applied itself in a broader sense to his placement as an artist.

The "search" within Diebenkorn's paintings was at a height during his time in New Mexico. His freedom and separation from established art hubs and familiar landscape allowed for a free improvisation that was previously ghosted by the dense contexts of New York and San Francisco. This improvisation was becoming truer to its definition in that it was not swayed by any means besides the authors' direct synthesis of the subject at hand. Gerald Nordland is attune to these aspects of Diebenkorn's work when he writes "It is improvisational, based on the artist's intuitive approach and his necessity to develop the work in the process of painting…Fidelity to what occurs between the artist and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, is a central working principle."[11] Throughout his paintings done in New Mexico, Diebenkorn not only accepted but also embraced the idea of correction in tandem with improvisation and discovery. The corrections are not steps to a precisely rendered image, but rather a residue that is "continually probing for visual correctness."[12]  This probing manifests itself in marks that are essentially revaluations and evidence of reflection in what has already been placed or taken away.

 Untitled (Albuquerque) [Image 4] from 1951 shows Diebenkorn's propensity to revel in his work and play an active role. The scattered transparency and scumbling of the brushwork reveal a history throughout the piece. The sandy beige section, percolated by fleeting moments of a rosy peach, settles like gossamer in the middles of this piece. The marks that the artist at one point felt inclined to make reveal themselves through this tissue, some more coyly than others. A black line, though broken, has a directness that is bold but not stark, rendering the beige mass below it ephemeral yet structural. The lines don’t only demarcate shapes and angles that have revealed themselves to the artist, but act as stepping-stones, or a progression, towards an abstracted distance. The marks culminate as reactions to the growing painting; they are involved in the higher conversation that rests between their brotherly marks within the work and the experience of the artist. This unreserved communication allows for multiple perspectives and intentions to be present. The corrections are integral in the search as they serve a place of re-entry, a way of keeping the mark or initial instinct alive and prosperous. Diebenkorn's ameliorations are didactic in nature; they are not working towards a single pre-conceived vision of reality and thus are enlivened with the ability to be divergent. This notion of divergence is critical when Diebenkorn is attempting to synthesize space, light and perception in abstract terms.

In a Essay written for the exhibition titled Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, Mark Lavatelli ventilates "In the raw and often tender beauty of this exciting body of work, one sees and feels echoes of the harsh and spacious high-desert environment and also a new openness to landscape influences that proved seminal for the rest of his distinguished painting career."[13] Diebenkorn's time spent in New Mexico had a direct affect on his pallet and handling of paint that becomes obvious in pieces such as Untitled (Albuquerque) 1950-151 [Image 5] and Albuquerque 22 [Image 6]. In these pieces there is an overt accentuation of the sandy and burnt qualities given to the brown and beiges of the desert.  Untitled (Albuquerque) 1950-151 pays particular attention to scorched surfaced. The warmth set off by the blue assertion at the bottom enables the canvas to give off its own heat where the colors encounter each other. The texture contained in the left side of the canvas is almost tangible and becomes reminiscent of scars visible on the bare earth's surface. Considering how attuned these and other pieces are to the desert, it is important to note the process previously discussed in which Diebenkorn arrived at these paintings. He is not working through systematic processes, tricks, or conventions that enable the paintings to reverberate a sense of the desert. And he is not simply reflecting any given landscape into a canvas.  The associations a viewer has while experiencing his paintings arise through a synthesized and empathetic response on the part of Diebenkorn; his response to his surroundings alongside his capability to leave room for playful improvisation. There was a specific and resounding success in New Mexico that was compounded when his pieces, after "probing for visual correctness," sensitively correlated with the New Mexico Landscape. The most successful pieces are thus testaments to Diebenkorn's development of a deep-seated empathy with the area and his life there.

Albuquerque 22 beholds a lyrical sequence of cracks on the surface; this beautiful imperfection bears with it the sense of strain that comes with the extremes of the desert. The distressed skin diffuses as it moves across the canvas while revealing virgin earth. The angle of two scraped lines and the faint historical marks in the top portion in conjunction with the improvisational black lines to the left and right give an inkling of a separate form and proximity to distance. The red circular mark in the upper left corner of the piece sets the left portion even further apart, although it seems capable of hovering both below and above the rest of the composition. These factors combined augment a persistent unrest; a metaphor true to the inherent non-stagnant state of the landscape and the consistent discourse Diebenkorn has between and within his paintings. This painting is a tremendously successful example of Diebenkorn's irresolute nature, and is an ode to his understanding that a painting can indeed live, breathe, and die within different states of discovery.   

The legerity and comfortable mood of the paintings being produced by Diebenkorn in New Mexico was a break from the cumbersome, painful, and agonized look of the paintings being made by his peers in San Francisco.[14] The production of heavily layered and impastoed paintings, being created by Diebenkorn's friend David Park, bore "dense, heavy surfaces and fought-for solutions in quest of meaningful resolutions in the act of painting," as quoted from Charles Strong's essay The Sky is in the Ocean written in conjunction with the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico. While obviously maintaining rigor, Diebenkorn's canvases were no longer being swayed by a suffocating application of paint. In an Untitled piece from 1949 [Image 7] there is a density that seems to stifle a nuance within the piece. While the complication within this piece is worthy of attention, it, among others, seem to teeter on the edge of a hesitancy instilled by the portends of influential attitudes in San Francisco; portends that deny it a certain intricacy.  There is a precedent to future work residing within the sections of color, treatment of the edge and intrusions of form, but the thick application and weight of paint resolves itself in a way that does not allow for the effective spontaneity of drawing that presents itself in later works.

An example of such a piece is Untitled (Albuquerque 3) from 1951 [Image 8]; I describe the black lines in this painting (and others like it), as scurrying. They dart across the surface, sometimes stopping for a moment to address a situation…only to scurry off again. I maintain that the inventive playfulness allowed in this painting brings a vitality that originates from the lines conversation with its surroundings. From an interview conducted in 1978 with Diebenkorn, Mark Lavatelli is able to give some insight on how Diebenkorn saw and utilized line: "He described three ways that line can be used…Lines form the outline of shapes; lines move independently of color fields or shape; and lines exist behind or within color fields."[15]All these employments of line set up a relationship with elements of the work so an interchange between them occurs. This interchange, and the act of drawing itself, becomes a means of searching or discovery. In a recent review from 2008 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Roberta Smith reflects: "Diebenkorn used drawing to create a parallel commentary on and within the painting, a way to 'talk back,' signal second thoughts or direct our attention. He encircled painted shapes with black lines for emphasis, crossed out forms or sprinkled in random X's, triangles, sudden loops and letter fragments. All these elements invite you to look more closely at the way the paintings have been made, layer by mark, creating lush physical narratives…"[16] I agree with Maurice Tuchman when he asserts that this quality of improvisation would have been regarded as frivolous in San Francisco due to its arbitrary relation to shape and form, he asserts that the spontaneity would rest more comfortably in the realm of theatre.[17]

I will assert here that the aforementioned scurrying lines that exists and persist in different forms throughout Diebenkorn's oeuvre are employed as a tool of negotiation for the artist. They also, seeing as the nature of the line is derivative of the drawings done by George Herriman, serve as a reminder of the unhindered freedom that enabled him to explore something to the fullest before it was proverbially snuffed out. Herrimen was the author of a comic strip titled Krazy Kat [Image9] that particularly interested the artist. The pertinence of Herriman's drawing was with Diebenkorn in New Mexico in the form of a book he had brought with him.[18] This inclusion was playful, and through an intuitive use and conversation with the line, Diebenkorn was able to manifest it in a sophisticated and original way. This is an insight to the allover improvisation and free-association of this New Mexico period, unchained to the actual landscape that would serve him in future works. I would also like to argue that the format and layout of the comic would have been digested and perceived by Diebenkorn, only to later be synthesized with other factors from which he was working. In Untitled (Albuquerque) [Image8], amongst the lines and interruptions, there seems to be a subtle announcement of interlocking color blocks and shapes. Without sterilizing the painting with one-to-one comparisons, I am attempting to point out the ambiguous similarities between the two in hopes of bringing to light the connection that line and construction had in both the comics and in various pieces of Diebenkorn's work, even past the New Mexico period.

The second half of Diebenkorn's stay in New Mexico was marked by further progress and new revelations involving the perspective involved when viewing a landscape. After a year at UNM he felt that he was not ready to leave and was able to convince the university to let him stay under special circumstances.  During a trip back to San Francisco in 1951, Diebenkorn experienced for the first time the New Mexico landscape from the sky. As an artist who worked with shifting planes, ambiguity of space and the abstraction of perspective, this experience surely was an intriguing moment for him. Diebenkorn is quoted as saying “The aerial view showed me a rich variety of ways of treating a flat plane – like flattened mud or paint. Forms operating in shallow depth reveal a huge range of possibilities.”[19] I will use the painting titled “Albuquerque 9” 1952 to expand on this quote. It is obvious in this painting that he has begun to assert edge in a different way, and while it was done before the flight, we see a peaking interest that abounded after the flight. One must remember that Diebenkorn was living a mile above sea level in Albuquerque, this height can indeed change a perspective. In conjunction with the primary colors he is able to create an allusive puzzle piece like state that begs to be flattened, but the hard edge in tandem with a soft glowing one gives a sense of hovering that refuses to stick to the canvas. The dark patch in the back of this painting subtly calls for a distance, but that distance is so intruded upon by all the perplexities of the for-front, that a sickening movement almost seems to occur. This perspective required its own rules, which Diebenkorn intended to explore

The expanse of time spent in New Mexico seems to exponentially compound itself with regard to the breakthroughs, freedom, and success Diebenkorn found there. People were interested in what he was doing, and the work being produced by him gained intrigue and served as a huge stepping-stone into a very successful future. Josephine and Paul cantor, who owned a gallery and a piece of Diebenkorn’s from a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Drove all the way out to see him and his work in New Mexico. [20] Enthused, this couple made purchases which proved to gain much attention for Diebenkorn when James Byrnes saw them and invited Albuquerque 9 [Image 10] along with Miller 22 from his graduate show to participate in LACMA’s show titled Contemporary Painting in The United States, which, according to Nordland, was an “unprecedented showcase for Southern California and western states.” [21]

The retrospective of his New Mexico work comes together to assert Diebenkorn as a mature and extremely sensitive artist. The pieces he produced in New Mexico attest to his receptiveness in multiple aspects. His unnerving acceptance of the connection of a person and place (and such a connection’s multitude of manifestations) comes with a sympathetic fluidity that lacks dogmatic chains. This holds profundity within itself, and serves as a solid argument for my assertion that New Mexico was a critical step in his career and the portend of his pieces. The evidence comes not just with the work he produced in New Mexico, but the decision to practice there in the first place.  The fact that he left a teaching job to go backwards into studies is alone enough to show Diebenkorn’s uncanny knack of moving in every single direction before even thinking about taking a step forward.

This didactic nature and divergent way of thinking enabled Diebenkorn to stay excited, and allowed him to resist dead dogma within his work and the broader forms of institutionalized Art context.  New Mexico not only enlightened and invigorated him with a sense of self by exercising his faculties in a thorough synthesis, but also revealed itself as successful place to explore an intimately personal relationship and experience that was solely his own in terms of prerogative and experience. The manifestations of such things would not serve as examples without this initiative and pretext.

 Diebenkorn was able to shake the entropy of outside receptors whilst in New Mexico; receptors that had become baggage. This shedding, perpetuated by location, powered him through the rest of his career. Without making one-to-one ratios, Diebenkorn’s viewers are introduced to a vein that opened in New Mexico and kept pumping. Though made in one place, the individuality of the New Mexico pieces cannot be subverted. Each piece involves self-referential qualities intrinsically connected to the artist, his place, and the specifically engaged involvement that pursued.

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[1]  Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn (New York: Rizzoli International Publications INC, 1987), 18.

[2] David Carrier, "Richard Diebenkorn. New York," The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 139, No. 1137, December, 1997, JSTOR(887681), 900.

[3] Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, 21.

[4] Maurice Tuchman, "Diebenkorn's Early Years," in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, ed. Maurice Tuchman et al. (New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1976), 10.

[5] Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn,

[6] Peter Selz, "Between Friends: Still and the Bay Area," Art in America vol. 63 (November-December 1975), p. 72.

[7] Ibid.,72.

[8] Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, 36.

[9] Gerald Nordland, “Richard Diebenkorn: Routes to New Mexico” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, ed. Gerald Nordland et al. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press), 19.

[10] Mark Lavatelli, “Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque Years” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, ed. Gerald Nordland et al. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press), 29.

[11] Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn, 89

[12] Tuchman, “Diebenkorn’s Early years,” 6.

[13] Lavatelli, “Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque year,” 29.

[14] Charles Strong, “The Sky is the Ocean” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, ed. Gerald Nordland et al. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press), 3.   

[15] Lavatelli,"Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque Years," 31.

[16] Roberta Smith, "An Expressionist in Albuquerque," The New York Times, January 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/arts/design/25dieb.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

[17] Tuchman, "Diebenkorn's Early Years," 13.

[18] Smith, "An Expressionist in Albuquerque."

[19] Nordland, “Richard Diebenkorn: Routes to New Mexico,” 22.

[20] Ibid., 21.

[21] Ibid., 22.

Image 1

The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel, 1916

Matisse

Image 2

Albuquerque (Motorcycle Wreck), 1951

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 3

Untitled (Magicians Table), 1947

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 4

Untitled (Albuquerque), 1951

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 5

Untitled (Albuquerque), 1950-51

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 7

Untitled, 1949

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 8

Untitled (Albuquerque 3), 1951

Richard Diebenkorn

Image 9

Krazy Kat Comics

George Herriman

Image 10

Albuquerque 9, 1952

Richard Diebenkorn

Bibliography

 

1. Buck, Robert T. Jr. "The Ocean Park Paintings," in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, edited by Maurice Tuchman, Gerald Nordland, Robert T. Buck, Jr., and Linda L. Cathcart, 42-55. New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1976.

2. Carrier, David. "Richard Diebenkorn. New York." The Burlington Magazine, vol. 139, No. 1137, December, 1997. JSTOR(887681). pp. 900-901.

3. Cathcart, Linda L. " Diebenkorn: Reaction and Response," in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, edited by Maurice Tuchman, Gerald Nordland, Robert T. Buck, Jr., and Linda L. Cathcart, 55-59. New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1976.

4. James, Merlin Ingli. “Richard Diebenkorn. London, Whitechapel.” The Burlington Magazine, vol.133, No. 1065, December, 1991. JSTOR(885074). pp. 857-859.

5. Lavatelli, Mark. “Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque year” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, Edited by Gerald Nordland, Mark Lavatelli, and Charles Strong, 29-34. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.

6. Nash, Stephen. "Diebenkorn, Abstraction, and Representation," in Richard Diebenkorn: From Nature to Abstraction, 5-10. Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, 1999.

7. Nordland, Gerald. Richard Diebenkorn. New York: Rizzoli International Publications INC, 1987.

8. Nordland, Gerald. “Richard Diebenkorn: Routes to New Mexico” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico. Edited by Gerald Nordland, Mark Lavatelli, and Charles Strong, 5-27. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.

9. Nordland, Gerald. "The Figurative Works of Richard Diebenkorn," in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, edited by Maurice Tuchman, Gerald Nordland, Robert T. Buck, Jr., and Linda L. Cathcart, 25-42. New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1976.

10. Selz, Peter. "Between Friends: Still and the Bay Area." Art in America vol. 63, November-December 1975. pp. 70-73.

11. Smith, Roberta. "An Expressionist in Albuquerque." The New York Times, January 25, 2008.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/arts/design/25dieb.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

12. Strong, Charles. “The Sky is the Ocean” in Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, Edited by Gerald Nordland, Mark Lavatelli, and Charles Strong, 3-4. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.   

13. Tuchman, Maurice. "Diebenkorn's Early Years," in Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, edited by Maurice Tuchman, Gerald Nordland, Robert T. Buck, Jr., and Linda L. Cathcart, 5-25. New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1976.