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Lot Essay
“The goal is not to present perfection, superficial continuity or consistency, but the act of creation itself, the reification of an abstract goal into concrete form on canvas.” - Richard Diebenkorn
A carefully orchestrated field of architectonic and polychrome forms exhibiting elegantly poised restraint, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #40 achieves the transcendental brilliance which only the best examples of the West Coast artist’s famed series attain. Masterfully disembodying the ephemeral aura of the natural world with his exceptional visional intelligence and remarkable technical virtuosity, Diebenkorn here accumulates the strength of the whole modern tradition—spanning from Cezanne and Matisse to Mondrian—into a compositionally complex tableau which subsumes the viewer with its monumental scale, inviting the onlooker to intense contemplation. As Sarah C. Bancroft memorably describes of the series, the works are like modern altarpieces, where “viewers are confronted not with their relationship to and place in the universe but with their own existence and relationship in space and time to the painting” (S. C. Bancroft, “A View of Ocean Park,” in Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, 2012, p. 22).
Representing a completed synthesis and culmination of his artistic and theoretical activity to date, Diebenkorn wrought Ocean Park #40 into a palimpsest of his oeuvre, its idiosyncratic gridded geometries and gem-toned planes achieving a sense of studied “rightness” where the artist’s long-labored pursuit of the perfect is found through spontaneity and improvisation. The great Diebenkorn scholar Jane Livingston identifies the work as the last example of the first period of Ocean Park paintings, characterized by how they each create their “own, self-contained chromatic universe, and each functions within that universe in a structurally self-sufficient way” (J. Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 64). The present work is an unrivaled masterpiece of abstraction made when Diebenkorn was at the summit of his creative powers, with Livingston writing of this period where “it might well be argued that, in this sense, Mark Rothko takes a distant second place to Richard Diebenkorn” in his complexity of incident and achievement of the sublime (op. cit., p. 65).
The seismic importance of Ocean Park #40 to both Diebenkorn’s oeuvre and American art history writ large is further emphasized by the work's market history, shattering the artist's record price not just once but twice—when S.I. Newhouse acquired the work in 1990 and when Elaine Wynn purchased the work in 2021, respectively.
With ten other examples from the first period of the Ocean Park works held in prestigious institutions, including the Phillips Collection and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Ocean Park #40 is an exceedingly rare work from this privileged segment of the Ocean Park series. Featured on the cover for Diebenkorn’s famous first exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series; Recent Work in 1971, the work was acquired thence by the influential collector S.I. Newhouse, before matriculating into the collection of the equally important collectors Anne Windfohr and John L. Marion. Ocean Park #40’s esteemed provenance exemplifies the work’s unimpeachable quality, and its featuring in several of Diebenkorn’s most important exhibitions further identifies the present work as one of the great magnum opuses from the Ocean Park series still in private hands.
Diebenkorn compositionally arranges Ocean Park #40 into two disparate areas, the engaging field of diagonal lines and trapezoidal shapes within the upper right register on one hand, and the more rectilinear area elsewhere in the tableau on the other. The most notable section of the painting is the small circular quadrant of deep ultramarine blue at the center right of the composition. Curvilinear forms are rare in the Ocean Park works, where Diebenkorn favored straight lines and even utilized a ruler, explaining that “the problem was that I didn’t want gesture, or the way hesitation could seem to lead to gesture” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in J. Elderfield, “Leaving Ocean Park,” in J. Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, op. cit., p. 108). Here, the blue form functions as a poetic caesura, providing a fulcrum around which the rest of the composition is resolved. Its brilliant blue tone recalls Yves Klein or even Giotto’s azure skies, establishing a chromatic counterpart to the more muted chromatic terrain across the rest of the canvas. Its addition makes Ocean Park #40 an almost unique example among the series.
Diebenkorn began this series after relocating to Santa Barabara following his acceptance of a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles. He moved into a new studio space in the Ocean Park neighborhood which had just been made vacant by Sam Francis, and his new works attest to the drastic change in atmosphere which he witnessed in his new working space. The studio’s high ceilings allowed Diebenkorn to work at a great scale, and the studio’s transom windows, which could be cranked open at an angle, inspired the angular geometries seen in the upper left of Ocean Park #40. In the new space, he was finally able to take advantage of his own height, using his whole body, standing at seventy-two inches, to operate at a human-sized scale. Diebenkorn once noted that he “wanted a kind of monumental thing. I wanted something that felt large… in working on what you might say is an oversize support, one is involved physically… and there’s a different measure in this large scale, and I wanted the content to have to do with that” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 21).
“I want art to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems — if they don’t overwhelm me — the better.” - Richard Diebenkorn
The various reworked passages in the present work, the scraping and repainting, drips, splatters and sprayed areas—known as pentimenti—express “anger, frustration, despair, relief—all these emotions came to bear on the [Ocean Park] paintings, a combination of intention, intuition, and improvisation” (ibid.). These areas demonstrate Diebenkorn’s strenuous labor, each mark a memento of his process. For the artist, each work was an exploration attempting to get at “rightness” and his struggle against his painting articulates his mentality toward his art form, Diebenkorn stating: “I want art to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems—if they don’t overwhelm me—the better” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 109). Diebenkorn explains his aim, describing how “the goal is not to present perfection, superficial continuity or consistency, but the act of creation itself, the reification of an abstract goal into concrete form on canvas” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit. p. 37).
As an artist, Diebenkorn saw revision and correction as a fundamental part of his method, and agonized over each addition as he sought to find the precise articulation of his pictorial thought. In this way, Diebenkorn distinguishes himself from the gestural Abstract Expressionists, whose works were based on spontaneity, an impulsive performance which Diebenkorn mistrusted. He instead labored over many days to achieve his perfectly balanced abstract worlds, recalling Gustave Flaubert’s excruciating pursuit of his mot juste—the perfect word—or Franz Kafka’s tormented writings rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernst Hemingway’s rapidly rendered works.
Diebenkorn’s creative similarities to European writers may be explained by his attentive study of European modernism, which informed and inspired his distinctive style. Cezanne, Matisse, and Mondrian form the triumvirate of artists whose example Diebenkorn followed, with Cezanne being his first influence, introduced to him by his professor Erle Loran, the great scholar of the French artist’s theories and methods. Diebenkorn later attested that in his artistic development, “the big break occurred with Cezanne,” particularly when he saw Mont Sainte-Victoire hanging in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. Landauer, “Significant Space in Diebenkorn’s Ocean Parks, in Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, 2012, p. 40). Meanwhile, Matisse’s bold innovation of color and abstracted sense of space are advanced further in Diebenkorn’s works, the Californian artist reveling in Matisse’s balanced attention to both represented subject and the abstract qualities of pictorial space, as well as his extoling of the painter’s process as itself an integral element of a painting’s subject matter. Mondrian’s regimented linear divisions provided Diebenkorn with insights as well, though Diebenkorn found the Dutch modernist’s neo-plasticism too rigid and staid to express the atmospheric aura he sought to attain.
“Time and struggle [are] as much the medium as paint and charcoal and canvas.” - Richard Diebenkorn
A long period of contemplatively viewing Ocean Park #40 functions as a visual archeology, excavating into and through Diebenkorn’s every measured line and stroke, each decision and revision a temporal record of the artist’s abstract goal. Erosion and erasure, obliteration and obsoletion, temporality and renewability are the true subject of the work, Diebenkorn’s masterpiece expressing obliquely a potent sense of time which engages the viewer’s senses wholistically. “Time and struggle [are] as much the medium as paint and charcoal and canvas,” the artist proclaimed (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit. p. 37). Bancroft tellingly describes how “all the Ocean Park works capture the ghosts, skeins and veils of the artist’s process, a topographical bird’s eye view of the history of the making of the work,” and in Ocean Park #40 this intangible temporality, as well as the work’s aesthetic brilliance and grave beauty, unite to achieve one of the most significant and profound works of Diebenkorn’s oeuvre (S. C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 35).
A carefully orchestrated field of architectonic and polychrome forms exhibiting elegantly poised restraint, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #40 achieves the transcendental brilliance which only the best examples of the West Coast artist’s famed series attain. Masterfully disembodying the ephemeral aura of the natural world with his exceptional visional intelligence and remarkable technical virtuosity, Diebenkorn here accumulates the strength of the whole modern tradition—spanning from Cezanne and Matisse to Mondrian—into a compositionally complex tableau which subsumes the viewer with its monumental scale, inviting the onlooker to intense contemplation. As Sarah C. Bancroft memorably describes of the series, the works are like modern altarpieces, where “viewers are confronted not with their relationship to and place in the universe but with their own existence and relationship in space and time to the painting” (S. C. Bancroft, “A View of Ocean Park,” in Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, 2012, p. 22).
Representing a completed synthesis and culmination of his artistic and theoretical activity to date, Diebenkorn wrought Ocean Park #40 into a palimpsest of his oeuvre, its idiosyncratic gridded geometries and gem-toned planes achieving a sense of studied “rightness” where the artist’s long-labored pursuit of the perfect is found through spontaneity and improvisation. The great Diebenkorn scholar Jane Livingston identifies the work as the last example of the first period of Ocean Park paintings, characterized by how they each create their “own, self-contained chromatic universe, and each functions within that universe in a structurally self-sufficient way” (J. Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997, p. 64). The present work is an unrivaled masterpiece of abstraction made when Diebenkorn was at the summit of his creative powers, with Livingston writing of this period where “it might well be argued that, in this sense, Mark Rothko takes a distant second place to Richard Diebenkorn” in his complexity of incident and achievement of the sublime (op. cit., p. 65).
The seismic importance of Ocean Park #40 to both Diebenkorn’s oeuvre and American art history writ large is further emphasized by the work's market history, shattering the artist's record price not just once but twice—when S.I. Newhouse acquired the work in 1990 and when Elaine Wynn purchased the work in 2021, respectively.
With ten other examples from the first period of the Ocean Park works held in prestigious institutions, including the Phillips Collection and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Ocean Park #40 is an exceedingly rare work from this privileged segment of the Ocean Park series. Featured on the cover for Diebenkorn’s famous first exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series; Recent Work in 1971, the work was acquired thence by the influential collector S.I. Newhouse, before matriculating into the collection of the equally important collectors Anne Windfohr and John L. Marion. Ocean Park #40’s esteemed provenance exemplifies the work’s unimpeachable quality, and its featuring in several of Diebenkorn’s most important exhibitions further identifies the present work as one of the great magnum opuses from the Ocean Park series still in private hands.
Diebenkorn compositionally arranges Ocean Park #40 into two disparate areas, the engaging field of diagonal lines and trapezoidal shapes within the upper right register on one hand, and the more rectilinear area elsewhere in the tableau on the other. The most notable section of the painting is the small circular quadrant of deep ultramarine blue at the center right of the composition. Curvilinear forms are rare in the Ocean Park works, where Diebenkorn favored straight lines and even utilized a ruler, explaining that “the problem was that I didn’t want gesture, or the way hesitation could seem to lead to gesture” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in J. Elderfield, “Leaving Ocean Park,” in J. Livingston, The Art of Richard Diebenkorn, op. cit., p. 108). Here, the blue form functions as a poetic caesura, providing a fulcrum around which the rest of the composition is resolved. Its brilliant blue tone recalls Yves Klein or even Giotto’s azure skies, establishing a chromatic counterpart to the more muted chromatic terrain across the rest of the canvas. Its addition makes Ocean Park #40 an almost unique example among the series.
Diebenkorn began this series after relocating to Santa Barabara following his acceptance of a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles. He moved into a new studio space in the Ocean Park neighborhood which had just been made vacant by Sam Francis, and his new works attest to the drastic change in atmosphere which he witnessed in his new working space. The studio’s high ceilings allowed Diebenkorn to work at a great scale, and the studio’s transom windows, which could be cranked open at an angle, inspired the angular geometries seen in the upper left of Ocean Park #40. In the new space, he was finally able to take advantage of his own height, using his whole body, standing at seventy-two inches, to operate at a human-sized scale. Diebenkorn once noted that he “wanted a kind of monumental thing. I wanted something that felt large… in working on what you might say is an oversize support, one is involved physically… and there’s a different measure in this large scale, and I wanted the content to have to do with that” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 21).
“I want art to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems — if they don’t overwhelm me — the better.” - Richard Diebenkorn
The various reworked passages in the present work, the scraping and repainting, drips, splatters and sprayed areas—known as pentimenti—express “anger, frustration, despair, relief—all these emotions came to bear on the [Ocean Park] paintings, a combination of intention, intuition, and improvisation” (ibid.). These areas demonstrate Diebenkorn’s strenuous labor, each mark a memento of his process. For the artist, each work was an exploration attempting to get at “rightness” and his struggle against his painting articulates his mentality toward his art form, Diebenkorn stating: “I want art to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems—if they don’t overwhelm me—the better” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in J. Elderfield, op. cit., p. 109). Diebenkorn explains his aim, describing how “the goal is not to present perfection, superficial continuity or consistency, but the act of creation itself, the reification of an abstract goal into concrete form on canvas” (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit. p. 37).
As an artist, Diebenkorn saw revision and correction as a fundamental part of his method, and agonized over each addition as he sought to find the precise articulation of his pictorial thought. In this way, Diebenkorn distinguishes himself from the gestural Abstract Expressionists, whose works were based on spontaneity, an impulsive performance which Diebenkorn mistrusted. He instead labored over many days to achieve his perfectly balanced abstract worlds, recalling Gustave Flaubert’s excruciating pursuit of his mot juste—the perfect word—or Franz Kafka’s tormented writings rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernst Hemingway’s rapidly rendered works.
Diebenkorn’s creative similarities to European writers may be explained by his attentive study of European modernism, which informed and inspired his distinctive style. Cezanne, Matisse, and Mondrian form the triumvirate of artists whose example Diebenkorn followed, with Cezanne being his first influence, introduced to him by his professor Erle Loran, the great scholar of the French artist’s theories and methods. Diebenkorn later attested that in his artistic development, “the big break occurred with Cezanne,” particularly when he saw Mont Sainte-Victoire hanging in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. Landauer, “Significant Space in Diebenkorn’s Ocean Parks, in Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, 2012, p. 40). Meanwhile, Matisse’s bold innovation of color and abstracted sense of space are advanced further in Diebenkorn’s works, the Californian artist reveling in Matisse’s balanced attention to both represented subject and the abstract qualities of pictorial space, as well as his extoling of the painter’s process as itself an integral element of a painting’s subject matter. Mondrian’s regimented linear divisions provided Diebenkorn with insights as well, though Diebenkorn found the Dutch modernist’s neo-plasticism too rigid and staid to express the atmospheric aura he sought to attain.
“Time and struggle [are] as much the medium as paint and charcoal and canvas.” - Richard Diebenkorn
A long period of contemplatively viewing Ocean Park #40 functions as a visual archeology, excavating into and through Diebenkorn’s every measured line and stroke, each decision and revision a temporal record of the artist’s abstract goal. Erosion and erasure, obliteration and obsoletion, temporality and renewability are the true subject of the work, Diebenkorn’s masterpiece expressing obliquely a potent sense of time which engages the viewer’s senses wholistically. “Time and struggle [are] as much the medium as paint and charcoal and canvas,” the artist proclaimed (R. Diebenkorn, quoted in S. C. Bancroft, op. cit. p. 37). Bancroft tellingly describes how “all the Ocean Park works capture the ghosts, skeins and veils of the artist’s process, a topographical bird’s eye view of the history of the making of the work,” and in Ocean Park #40 this intangible temporality, as well as the work’s aesthetic brilliance and grave beauty, unite to achieve one of the most significant and profound works of Diebenkorn’s oeuvre (S. C. Bancroft, op. cit., p. 35).