06/01/2026
in 1966 Richard Diebenkorn moved from Berkeley to Santa Monica, where Diebenkorn accepted a teaching position at UCLA. Within several months of beginning work in his first Santa Monica studio, located in a neighborhood near the beach known as Ocean Park, the artist embarked on the great cycle of paintings and drawings, the “Ocean Park period.” In doing so, he definitively ended his figurative approach, to invent a unique abstract language he would develop until 1988. In 1971, he had his first exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York; these three shows became much-anticipated opportunities to observe the unfolding of the Ocean Park vocabulary. In 1977, he moved to New York’s M. Knoedler & Co., Inc, where, over the course of the next decade he exhibited nearly annually. This would become a series of events perhaps even more appreciated than his earlier Ocean Park shows at Marlborough. With the widely noticed traveling exhibition organized by the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976, his national reputation as both a figurative and abstract artist, became secure.
