American, 1922 - 1993
Richard Diebenkorn was born in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied art. He served in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945 and was stationed at Quantico, Virginia. Following his discharge from the Marines after World War II, Diebenkorn studied at several California art schools and graduated from Stanford University in 1949. He was painting during this time, and had his first one-man exhibition in 1948 at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor. He lived for a period in the early 1950s in New Mexico, and received a master's degree in art from the University of New Mexico. Later he taught art at the University of Illinois for a year, then returned to California, where he settled in Berkeley and became a professor of drawing and painting at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and continued to produce his own work. He died in Berkeley on March 30, 1993.