LACMA's collection of contemporary
art contains almost 2000
works from across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, created between
1945 and the present. A diverse range of mediums and forms
are represented, including painting and sculpture, installation
and conceptual art, and video and film. At the end of 2007,
the collection will move to new quarters at the Broad Contemporary
Art Museum at LACMA, designed by architect Renzo Piano. There
it will be integrated with works from the holdings of collectors
and LACMA patrons, Eli and Edythe Broad. The Broads' collections
are a remarkable compendium of significant works by some of
the most important artists of the last four decades. They complement
the museum's holdings in exciting ways; taken together the
collections form a rich and nuanced history of art after World
War II. 
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Highlight from the Contemporary Art Collection
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RICHARD DIEBENKORN
United States, Oregon, Portland, 1922-1993, active California
Ocean Park Series No. 49, 1972
Oil on canvas
93 x 81 in. (236.2 x 205.7 cm)
M.73.96
Purchased with funds provided by Paul Rosenberg & Co., Mrs. Lita Hazen, and the David E. Bright Bequest
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During the late 1940s and early 1950s Richard Diebenkorn associated
with Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and other young San Francisco artists
whose innovative abstract expressionist paintings reflected the restless
energy of the years after World War II. Yet, by the mid-1950s, Park,
Bischoff, and Diebenkorn had each turned to representation, a reversal
symbolized by Park's abrupt destruction of his abstract works late
in 1949: one afternoon he jettisoned all of them at the Berkeley
city dump.
At the time this switch of polarity seemed both retrogressive and
shocking; in fact it was part of a more general postwar revival of
figuration. Yet each of the three painters remained preoccupied with
the flat plane, tension between colors, and the viscous surfaces
of abstraction. Diebenkorn continued to explore these elements in
the California cityscapes, terraces and rooms, and beach vistas that
attested his long study of Henri Matisse's interior scenes and landscapes.
Diebenkorn acknowledges a fascination with natural landscape forms
seen from the air and the passages of tilling, planting, harvesting,
and erosion. All this emerges in the Ocean Park series, which marked
his return to abstract painting shortly after he moved from the San
Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in 1965.
The Ocean Park paintings, about 140 in number, are generally tall
canvases composed in variations of vertical and horizontal bars appearing
over or under thin, washy panels of color. Like the plow's course
through the fields of an aerial landscape, Diebenkorn's tracks remain
in his paintings. He paints out, paints over, looks again, guided
by the revelations the act of painting unfolds before him.
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