Richard Diebenkorn

As a member of the Bay Area Figurative movement that arose in the San Francisco Bay region in the mid-1950s, Richard Diebenkorn developed a gestural style of painting that trod the line between abstraction and representation. His work took a more figurative turn in the late 1950s, and his paintings from this period include several depictions of figures in architectural settings and windows opening onto expansive landscapes, among them Girl Looking at Landscape. With her back to the viewer, the anonymous girl seems caught in a moment of private reverie, an atmosphere that led the critic Irving Sandler, in a 1961 review, to describe Diebenkorn’s figures as “introspective and lonely, affected by the vastness of the settings in which they are placed.”

In both its subject and its expressive use of color, Girl Looking at Landscape owes a debt to French painters such as Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, whose work Diebenkorn encountered during the 1940s, and additionally indicates the influence of abstract painters such as Clyfford Still and Hassel Smith, who worked in the Bay Area. The geometric frame of the window and the bold blocks of color that delineate the landscape beyond anticipate Diebenkorn’s later Ocean Park series, in which the modular forms of ground and sky would become more abstract. Throughout his career, impressions are conveyed through the relation of geometry to figuration, the balance of parts being key to Diebenkorn’s process. The moment a painting was finished, he explained, was when “the relationship of the figure and the setting seem psychologically right.”