Untitled [head and shoulders of a woman] 1955 - 1967

Richard Diebenkorn made this portrait of a woman with ink on paper, though we don’t know exactly when. The stark lines and minimalist style reduce the sitter to a set of essential forms. Diebenkorn emerged from a generation of artists working after the Second World War, when the US art world was undergoing a shift in its center of gravity from Paris to New York. Artists like Diebenkorn were torn between the European tradition of figurative painting and the American impulse towards abstraction. Thinkers of the time questioned what art could be after the horrors of the war. Was it appropriate to continue painting the human form? Or was pure abstraction the only ethical path? Diebenkorn's work sits in the tension between these two poles. The date of this work is unknown, but to understand it more fully we could consult exhibition catalogues, biographies of the artist, and analyses of the post-war American art world. In doing so, we can consider the social conditions of its making.