Another Diebenkorn forgery scandal

Although I didn't express this adequately in my book, I've always felt as if I, by forging the initials of Richard Diebenkorn onto an unsigned painting and trying to pass it off as his work, dishonored the memory of a man I consider to be a great artist. This is one of the many things I regret about what I did.

My favorite works by Richard Diebenkorn are those he produced in the late fifties and early sixties, when he, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and other Northern California artists took a bold step away from non-representational work and returned to representational painting, drawing upon the things they learned they learned as abstract expressionists and applying them to landscapes, figures, and still life subjects. Their work is rich, striking, and in many cases, truly captivating. This movement, usually called the "Bay Area Figurative School," never got the attention it deserved. Had Andy Warhol and the New York pop artists not stolen the show, this may have been deemed the era's most important movement in American art. As it is, the heavy steps taken by these Bay Area pioneers continue to reverberate to this day, and their influence on subsequent generations of California artists is obvious.

On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee printed a sad and shocking article about what appears to be another case of someone forging Richard Diebenkorn's monogram onto unsigned paintings. Acording to this article, a former student of Diebenkorn who was influenced by his figurative works, and painted in a similar style, consigned some of his paintings to a prominent, well-respected Northern California art dealer. These works later left the gallery bearing Diebenkorn's signature, and were apparently sold for very large sums. Some of these pieces ended up in private collections and one of them (shown above) was even pictured and misattributed to Diebenkorn in a book published by the Crocker Art Museum.

I don't know what really happened, and the whole affair seems to have been settled out of court. Unfortunetly, it's yet another sad commentary on the state of the art market, and adds further fuel to a fire that I, in my own small way, very regrettably helped stoke.