Michael Zakian on Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942-1955

In the video, Michael Zakian, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, in Malibu, CA, reflects on Richard Diebenkorn: Beginnings, 1942-1955. The presentation is very special, as it is the only Southern California venue for the traveling exhibition, and as Zakian has remarked: “Many of the early images, influences, and references that later defined Diebenkorn’s mature drawings and paintings began here in Southern California.” The video features rarely seen and beloved works on paper, paintings, and archival photography. Of the installation at the Weisman and its impact on the public, Zakian remarks that “it shows Diebenkorn’s genesis” and that artists “really have to go through a struggle” of testing and experimenting.
Organized by the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, the exhibition is the first to solely examine the work Diebenkorn made nearly 25 years before his epic Ocean Park series. Focused exclusively on paintings and drawings made between 1942 and 1955, Beginnings features approximately 90 works, most of which have never before been publicly exhibited, in oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, crayon, and collage, tracing Diebenkorn’s evolution from representational landscape, to semiabstract and Surrealist-inspired work, to his mature Abstract Expressionist paintings.
The video was produced at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art within the museum’s 2019 presentation of Beginnings on view from January 12-March 31.