Gerald Nordland

Breaking the Mold focuses on paintings from a pivotal time, one of transition from postwar abstract expressionism to new artistic developments. It includes works on paper, paintings, and sculpture by fifty artists including Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, and Marcel Duchamp. The Washington Gallery of Modern Art (WGMA) was founded in Washington, DC, on October 28, 1961, to increase the national and international attention given to contemporary art in the nation's capital, with an expressed purpose to exhibit and collect contemporary works of art. In 1968, the museum's collection was sold to the Oklahoma Art Center. This historically important collection from the former Washington gallery played an important role in the collection and cultivation of contemporary American art movements from the 1950s and 1960s, including late abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism, and pop art.

Richard Diebenkorn is generally acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. The luminous abstractions of his later career and the innovative figurative works of his middle years firmly established him as a master in the high tradition of modernism. This revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive monograph on the artist presents a rich selection of the artist's oeuvre. Until the mid-1950s, he painted in the abstract expressionist tradition (synthesizing, as he has since, such disparate influences as de Kooning, Gorky, Hopper, and Cezanne) before turning (unfashionably) to figurative painting along with artists David Park and Elmer Bischoff. He then embarked on the series of large abstract paintings for which he is best known--each titled Ocean Park after the beachside community where he worked. Reminiscent of Matisse in color and Mondrian in geometry, these are some of the most remarkable accomplishments of twentieth-century art. The updated section of this edition follows Diebenkorn's career from the mid-1980s until his death, focusing particularly on his adventurous late works on paper. In each "phase" of his career, Diebenkorn explored the intricate interplay between formal rigor and luminous, sensual color with the same masterful hand. Along with several hundred reproductions of the artist's work, critic Gerald Norland provides a thoughtful and informative study of Diebenkorn's life and career, an updated comprehensive exhibition history, and a selected bibliography. Author Bio: GERALD NORLAND is an art critic and former museum administrator whose work has appeared in many national and international publications. A contributor to Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1980, he his also the author of Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work. As a museum administrator, he has held positions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery at the University of California in Los Angeles. He has been a commentator on the life and art of Richard Diebenkorn for almost 40 years.