Diebenkorn Comes to Cal

It wasn't art but war that first brought Richard Diebenkorn to Berkeley.

It wasn't art but war that first brought Richard Diebenkorn to Berkeley. Arguably California's greatest 20th-century painter, or at least its most Californian, Diebenkorn started his formal art training at Stanford in 1940. Bt 1943, with World War II in full cry, Diebenkorn joined an officers' training program in the U.S. Marines. The Corps sent him to Cal.

That Diebenkorn ended up sitting out the war in the Marines' photographic section in Hawaii might indicate the kind of classes he favored while at Berkeley. The art department at the time was still in thrall to the abstract German painter Hans Hoffman, whose teaching stints in 1930 and 1931 inspired the embrace of the modernist gospel by the Berkeley faculty. Cezanne disciple and Berkeley painting professor Erle Loran also published his influential "Cezanne's Composition" textbook in 1943. Between the French master's angular landscapes and Hoffman's dynamic fields of color, Berkeley graced Diebenkorn with two of the primary elements that would come to define his early style.

"Berkeley No. 8," 1954
Copyright The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn

After the war, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). He spent time in New York, absorbing the ideas and energetic discipline of the New York School. He earned his M.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1951. But it was to Berkeley Diebenkorn would ultimately return, in 1953, to undertake his first great painting project, the Berkeley Series.

In 1966, he moved to Santa Monica to become a professor at UCLA. But, as he told The New Yorker in a 1987 profile, Berkeley remained a lasting influence: Another thing that really affected me was a studio I once had in Berkeley. . . .It was a triangular room at the back of a tavern. I could open a door and look right down the bar at all the regulars. The was a lot of useless furniture built into the wall, and when I pulled it off you could see many different overlapping layers of house paint. The effect was fascinating.

Diebenkorn died in Berkeley in 1993.

– Marcus Wohlsen

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