Untitled (Albuquerque)
frame: 56 1/2 × 43 1/2 × 2 in. (143.5 × 110.5 × 5.1 cm)
- New to the Museum: 2024 Collection
Richard Diebenkorn
1922 Portland, Oregon - 1993 Berkeley, California
Untitled (Albuquerque)
1952
oil on canvas
Albuquerque Museum, museum purchase made possible by the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation and the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
PC2024.34.1
Richard Diebenkorn’s painting Untitled (Albuquerque), 1952, is a meaningful recent addition to the Albuquerque Museum permanent collection. Recognized as one of the most important artists of the 20th Century, Diebenkorn completed a Masters in Fine Art at the University of New Mexico. He lived and worked in Albuquerque from 1950-1952 and described how the deep colors of the landscape, spectacular mountains, and vast blue skies of New Mexico deeply impacted his abstract works. In this untitled painting, the deep earth tones of the geometric and organic lines and shapes punctuate rich yellow and ochre colors rendered throughout the canvas. Diebenkorn describes his first flight from Albuquerque to the Bay Area as an experience that shaped his famous later works that made up the Ocean Park series of paintings and prints. He captured an abstracted bird’s-eye view of the California landscape and the Pacific Ocean.
