Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
Richard Diebenkorn in 1986
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 67, 1973, oil on canvas, 100 × 81 in. Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life."
Girl with Plant (1960), The Phillips Collection
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
"City Life" mural, Coit Tower, San Francisco, painted by Arnautoff
Another part of the City Life mural, featuring a self-portrait of Arnautoff, near a magazine rack containing socialist/communist magazines.
