Ocean+Park,+No.+6

Date: 1968
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1999/1999.17_1a.jpg?itok=J4-VrfBk width="246" height="312" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/ocean-park-no-6-38323"]] || Title: **Ocean Park, No. 6**

Artist: **Richard Diebenkorn** Born: Portland, Oregon 1922 Died: Berkeley, California 1993

Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 92 x 72 in. (233.7 x 182.9 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith

Accession: 1999.17 || Diebenkorn maintained that while he was often pigeonholed as either a figural painter or an abstract artist, he was always, at heart, a landscape painter. Ocean Park, No. 6 has something of all three Diebenkorns. The overlapping planes of color recall the view from above as the artist flew over Southern California noting the "ghosts of former tilled fields [and] patches of land being eroded." The progression evokes a flattened topographical image of dry hills descending to roads, sand, and water. But Diebenkorn upended the traditional landscape format from a long horizontal to a vertical. The canvas measures almost eight feet, or the reach of a grown man extending an arm upward. And the suggestion of pink-tinged flesh is unmistakable, as if Diebenkorn's memory of two bathers spooning on the beach intruded into his abstract composition.
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