The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation has launched an encyclopaedic digital platform containing more than 8,000 items related to the late American painter and printmaker. The archive features high-resolution records of around 3,500 artworks and an extensive collection of scholarly articles, including From the Basement, an ongoing quarterly publication produced by the foundation.
“Previously, we did not have the capacity to physically open our archives for every request,” says Andrea Liguori, the managing director of the Berkeley-based foundation. “We wanted to stay relevant, accessible and make it easier for the next generation of artists, scholars, enthusiasts and the general public who are using smaller screens to digest visual and scholarly content.”
Among the online offerings, the foundation has digitised excerpts of Diebenkorn’s catalogue raisonné, published in 2016 in conjunction with Yale University Press and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. And a recent essay accompanied with archival photographs examines the artist’s relationship with the photographer Leo Holub, who photographed Diebenkorn in nearly every decade of his working life, beginning in the 1960s when the painter's career was ascending.
In 2024, the foundation plans to release a new catalogue raisonné documenting Diebenkorn’s printmaking. The first catalogue—covering more than 5,000 sketches, drawings, paintings on paper, board, canvas and sculptural objects—was “central to our first 20 years of effort as a foundation”, Liguori says. “However, during that time, we forced ourselves to temporarily look away from the other significant output of Diebenkorn's career."
The new slipcased, two-volume catalogue, published by Yale University Press, will include Diebenkorn’s woodcuts, etchings, monoprints and monotypes, intaglio prints and lithographs, covering an additional 500 works made between 1946 and 1993.
