Richard Diebenkorn’s Red Yellow Blue (1986) is a striking work that exemplifies the artist’s mastery of balance between spontaneity and control, gesture and structure. Executed during the later phase of his career, when his celebrated Ocean Park series had already cemented his place as one of the most important figures in postwar American art, this composition embodies his lifelong dialogue between abstraction and figuration.

At first glance, the surface presents itself with a confident simplicity: three primary zones of red, yellow, and blue. Yet, upon closer inspection, the eye discovers layers of nuance—scraped paint, pentimenti, and subtle modulations of tone that reveal the artist’s process of continual adjustment. The edges of each color field are never rigidly defined; instead, they hover with a painterly softness, as if the hues breathe into one another. This permeability between areas of color imbues the canvas with a sense of light and atmosphere, recalling the coastal California environment that so deeply influenced Diebenkorn’s vision.

The red section radiates warmth, its surface activated by visible brushwork that lends it energy and depth. The yellow, luminous and expansive, functions as a transitional passage, at once anchoring and lifting the composition. The blue, resonant and contemplative, provides a grounding presence, its depth suggesting the open sky or distant sea. Together, these colors do not simply sit side by side as formal elements; they engage in an elegant dialogue, evoking both harmony and tension, restraint and vitality.

Red Yellow Blue reveals Diebenkorn’s ability to merge the lessons of European modernism—particularly Matisse’s use of color and structure—with the American ethos of Abstract Expressionism. While the painting is fundamentally abstract, it carries with it the sensibility of landscape, architecture, and lived experience. The viewer senses the artist’s hand and thought at every juncture, as though the painting is both a finished object and a record of its own becoming.

This work stands as a meditation on color, space, and perception. It captures the essence of Diebenkorn’s late career: distilled, luminous, and deeply human. By reducing his palette to the three primaries, he demonstrates that even within the strictest constraints, infinite variations of mood and meaning can be discovered.

Richard Diebenkorn Red Yellow Blue is hand-signed and dated by Richard Diebenkorn (Oregon, 1922 - Berkeley, 1993) in pencil in the margin lower right, numbered from the edition of 60 in pencil in the lower left.

Catalogue Raisonné & COA:
Richard Diebenkorn Red Yellow Blue, 1986 is fully documented and referenced in the below catalogue raisonné and texts (copies will be enclosed as added documentation with the invoices that will accompany the sale of the aquatint).

1. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany this artwork.

About the Framing:
Framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, Richard Diebenkorn Red Yellow Blue, 1986 is presented in a complementary moulding and optical grade Plexiglas.