ArtScope Highlight: Richard Diebenkorn’s Woman in Profile, 1958

Winter days got you feeling wistful? We hear ya. The subject of Woman in Profile, a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, channels this contemplative mood beautifully. Diebenkorn was a painter best known for his involvement in the Bay Area Figurative movement, in which artists applied the active brushwork of Abstract Expressionism to figures, still lifes and landscapes, creating planes of abstraction within more representational imagery. Diebenkorn spent much of his life in California, including a stint in Berkeley, and the imagery of his paintings reflects this. A trademark of his process is the visible remnant, wherein traces of hidden layers, accumulated in the process of building up the image, are allowed to remain on the surface of a painting.

Get contemplative with Diebenkorn:

• Click here to read an SFMOMA Open Space post on Diebenkorn’s Woman in Profile
• Click here for a video of Diebenkorn discussing natural light in his paintings