Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #41, 1971.
Critic Robert Hughes once called Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings “among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush.” Ocean Park #41 shows us why— a masterwork of restraint and revision, mood and structure, memory and sensation.
Ocean Park #41 is part of Diebenkorn’s celebrated Ocean Park series, a body of work he developed over nearly two decades while living and working in Santa Monica. With each canvas, he explored not just form and color but the act of painting itself—erasing, reworking, and layering until he arrived at a composition that felt, as he put it, “right.”
Here, you can see that process in motion: lines are drawn and redrawn, planes of color scraped and overlaid, all leading to a calm yet complex balance of geometry and atmosphere. It’s a painting that remembers its own making—ghosts of earlier decisions shimmer beneath the surface—a visual map of thought, revision, light, and place.
To me, what makes Ocean Park #41 exceptional is how it captures both a specific light and a way of seeing. The luminous palette—grays, greens, soft blues, punctuated by vivid touches of red and gold—mirrors the wash of California light as if through the windows of Diebenkorn’s studio.
This work marks a shift in the Ocean Park series: away from crisp diagonals and saturated contrasts toward something more diaphanous, open, and meditative. Looking closely, the painting seems to build on abstraction, but it behaves like a landscape, one you sense rather than see. It’s an abstract painting with the sensibility of a place—a poetic rendering of how time and light pass through a room by the sea.
This painting, part of the estate of an exceptional private collector, was brought to auction by Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory and sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2015.
