“Richard Diebenkorn was a lifelong learner. He understood the importance of education and professorship, and he championed continuous artistic exploration throughout his entire career. He valued the search, once writ-ing on a scrap of paper in his studio, ‘Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.’ In 1942, Diebenkorn enrolled in his first college art classes as a sophomore at Stanford University, where his professor, Daniel Mendelowitz, became an early mentor and advocate of the young artist.”

“Notice the colors, the brushstrokes, the multiple layers. Take a minute of silence to just look at the work and observe its nuances, as well as the immediacy of its scale. Looking at Window (1967) gives us the opportunity to think about and share where we, the viewers, actually are and what we are looking at. There are no right or wrong observations, [but we’re asked to] define our perspective: Where are we as the viewers? Are we inside or outside?”

“In his sketchbooks, Diebenkorn worked out familiar themes and structures seen later in his paintings. For example, there is a study drawing in Sketchbook #15 of the painting Window, one of Diebenkorn’s first large-scale paintings and the first to be completed in his studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, California. The model in a resting pose in Sketchbook #24 is similar to the figure in the painting Resting, a painting last shown in 1954 at an exhibition in London and now on view at the Cantor.”