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Description: Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Volume 1: Essays and References)
The Richard Diebenkorn catalogue raisonné project began twenty years ago. Over these two decades it has undergone an extraordinary progression of organizational restructuring, scheduling changes, scope increases, and staff growth. The only consistent element over the course of the whole project has been the participation of Richard Diebenkorn’s family. As a member of this...
PublisherYale University Press
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Preface
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Description: f0004-01
Richard and Phyllis Diebenkorn walking on Santa Cruz Island, 3 May 1988. Elizabeth Hvolboll, Courtesy Santa Cruz Island Foundation
This catalogue raisonné is dedicated to the memory of Phyllis Gilman Diebenkorn (1921–2015), whose lifelong dedication to her husband’s legacy informs every part of the work.
Phyllis’s discernment in matters both large and small, during her husband’s lifetime and the years ensuing, has contributed immeasurably to the complex ways in which this legacy is known and preserved.
 
Richard M. Grant, Executive Director
Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
The Richard Diebenkorn catalogue raisonné project began twenty years ago. Over these two decades it has undergone an extraordinary progression of organizational restructuring, scheduling changes, scope increases, and staff growth. The only consistent element over the course of the whole project has been the participation of Richard Diebenkorn’s family. As a member of this family—Richard Diebenkorn was my father-in-law—I will provide here a brief history.
We first began to discuss a catalogue effort in 1994, partly in response to unauthenticated Ocean Park drawings then surfacing in the market. While the family was not so naive as to think forgery would never be an issue, the timing of the first appearance of these works made the matter more urgent. Diebenkorn died in March of 1993; within months of his death, the family became aware of unauthenticated drawings, accompanied by no records and of incomplete and untraceable purported provenance. While there was no absolute proof—the materials Diebenkorn used had been commonly available for many years, so forensic analysis would be of little use—members of the family and trusted advisers unanimously believed these works should not be authenticated. The family was in a quandary: What practical steps could be taken to prevent these works from being introduced into the marketplace as genuine Diebenkorns? Everyone we consulted—dealers, scholars, curators, museum directors—gave us the same advice: Create a catalogue raisonné. While such a catalogue wouldn’t eliminate the problem, it would certainly be a deterrent. This was a truly practical approach to the problem, and it would also yield something of lasting value in many other ways. We decided to proceed.
No obvious organizational entity existed, however, to which the family could turn to take on such a catalogue. Often, we came to learn, an estate would rely on the dealer of a recently deceased artist to create and publish a catalogue. In our case this was impractical; the unauthenticated drawings had first appeared at Diebenkorn’s longtime dealer. The family decided to start the project privately. Since my primary career had been in the software industry and project management consulting, Phyllis Diebenkorn, my mother-in-law, asked me if I would be willing to oversee the process. In a stunning display of naive optimism, I assumed that I could make this happen in a few years of part-time work, with the help of some data-entry contractors.
I did an initial survey of the data already available. During the 1980s, while the Diebenkorns were still living in Santa Monica, Phyllis and her secretary, Linda Birke, had made a list of all of the oil paintings for which any records existed. This document—still referred to internally as “Linda’s List”—was in the form of a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and contained all known provenance and exhibition data as well as descriptive information. In addition to this list of works on canvas, Phyllis and Linda had created data cards holding information on most—or so we thought—of the drawings, particularly those that had been exhibited. Thirty-five-millimeter slides or transparencies of most of them also existed. All this material was in the office at the Diebenkorn home in Sonoma County. We didn’t know what percentage of Diebenkorn’s total oeuvre it represented, but we felt that, taken as a whole, it made a solid foundation on which to build a database.
First, we created a requirements definition, a formal listing of every project needed for the final product to be considered a success. This process forced us to think through the content and proposed uses of the catalogue. Next, we needed a powerful software tool to capture and maintain the data. Ideally we would employ a fully integrated data and image system, maintained by someone who would stay in business until the completion of the project. It had to be configurable rather than customizable; that is, all individual customers have the same product, but they can set parameters to configure this to their own needs, without custom code. This vastly reduces the burden of maintenance for the vendor.
In 1994 and 1995 my wife, Gretchen, and I visited catalogue raisonné projects and museums to see and evaluate the software being used to manage their collections. It was clear to me that the only difference between the data needed by a museum and that used in a catalogue raisonné is that a museum has more than one artist. Everything else—object data, images, bibliography, exhibition history, provenance, condition reporting, inventory, and location—is the same.
After visiting many museums and cataloguing projects, we were not impressed with the current state of collection management software. The robust database management systems were still running on mainframe computers, but had inadequate image-handling capabilities. In 1995 the editing and storage of digital images was just coming into its own, but tended to be found on personal computers in conjunction with lightweight database management systems. We needed something that integrated the best of both worlds.
Finally, our travels took us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum had just implemented a new system, designed to the museum’s own specifications but easily configured for a wide variety of collection management environments. Though it used the latest image-handling technology, it was built on industrial-strength Microsoft database software used in large business environments, SQL Server. This was particularly important because it meant that if the software vendor ceased to support the product, the data would be accessible via other off-the-shelf software products. Developed by Gallery Systems in New York, the product was called the Museum System. Many of the world’s important museums use this system now; thus we share a database structure with the institutions from which we have gathered much of our data.
Having chosen the tool, we set to work capturing the data immediately available to us. We took the initial data from Linda’s List; next, using an interim relational database, we began to add the drawings data in a common format. By the time we finally converted into the Museum System, we had interrelated object, provenance, and exhibition history records. Seeing these in the elegant Museum System format gave us a feeling of immediate accomplishment that, inevitably, gave way to a new realization of our undertaking’s depth.
In 1995, while conducting the product evaluation and selection, the family selected Acquavella Galleries as the estate’s dealer. This allowed us to formalize the catalogue raisonné project under the auspices of the gallery in early 1996. Our agreement specified that the gallery would engage the services of Gerald Nordland, a longtime friend and highly respected Diebenkorn scholar. He worked from his Chicago base, sending out hundreds of information requests to institutions nationwide and culling a great deal of valuable information from his own files and those of his many contacts in the art world. Contractors in our offices in Sonoma County and Berkeley entered the data he provided into a shared Museum System database that could be accessed from any location via the Internet.
This structure remained in place until 2002, when, by mutual agreement, we stopped working with Acquavella on the catalogue raisonné. Acquavella was gracious and helpful with the transition to the Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (which ultimately became Van Doren Waxter), and the catalogue raisonné project temporarily pulled back into a family-run affair while we searched for a nonprofit partner.
At this point, about eight years into the project, we were fully aware that the amount of research needed was far greater than we had originally anticipated. For one thing, many more works existed than we had expected. Searches of drawers, cupboards, attics, garages, and storage facilities uncovered boxes and portfolios containing many hundreds of heretofore-unknown drawings. In addition, we would have to decide how we would ultimately convert this data into a book. For this, an experienced partner was required. We needed a publisher.
Fortunately, we had access to someone with a great deal of experience in these matters: Jane Livingston, who had worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art to produce a major Diebenkorn exhibition and catalogue in 1996–97. As she assembled this show, she had considerable interaction with the family, and of course there was a symbiotic overlap with the activities of the catalogue raisonné. The University of California Press in Berkeley had successfully copublished and distributed Jane’s exhibition catalogue. Based on her relationship with then director Jim Clark, negotiations began between the estate and UC Press to publish the book.
Concurrent with the UC Press initiative, we considered our options for partnership with a museum. Diebenkorn had enjoyed a long, positive relationship with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The Legion of Honor gave him his first solo exhibition in 1948, and FAMSF had continued to support his work ever since. The family had a cordial relationship with FAMSF assistant director Steve Nash. I met with Nash, and we worked out a partnership agreement. We took the proposal to director Harry Parker, and he approved: FAMSF would become the copublisher and the fiscal agent for the catalogue raisonné. Harry Parker generously wrote many letters to potential donors, who could make tax-deductible contributions to FAMSF in support of the project, securing considerable funding. This partnership and Harry Parker’s assistance were instrumental in our receiving a generous grant from the Luce Foundation. A three-way partnership was created between the estate, FAMSF, and UC Press. Jane Livingston became the editor. Andrea Liguori’s collaboration with Jane became a co-editorship between the two.
One by one, we added research, data entry, and imaging personnel to the staff in our Berkeley office and met several times with UC Press staff. Gerald Nordland’s work continued to bear fruit as word spread about the catalogue; owners regularly contacted us, the number of “lost” works steadily declined, and we discovered new data and objects. UC Press was understandably concerned that we still couldn’t answer the question of exactly how many works there would finally be, and how extensive the publication. The catalogue grew from one to four volumes; naturally, cost estimates crept up. Eventually, UC Press was forced to ask to restructure the arrangement. The project was taking years longer than anticipated, and had grown exponentially. The press generously offered to release us from our contract so we might partner with another press. For facilitating this smooth transition, we are grateful to them.
We were by now more savvy about what it means to create a catalogue raisonné. We’d learned a great deal from colleagues in the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, who had preceded us down this road. We learned that the Dedalus Foundation was working with Yale University Press on a Robert Motherwell catalogue. I had many conversations with Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, about their favorable and productive experience with Yale. At the same time our editors proposed our project to Patricia Fidler, publisher, Art and Architecture, at Yale. Subsequently, in 2010, I and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco negotiated the agreement with Yale that resulted in this publication.
Historically, the purpose of a catalogue raisonné has been to compile, organize, and publish the data about all or a defined subset of an artist’s work. That was our primary objective—but we had an opportunity to do more. The quality of reproductions of Diebenkorn’s works over many decades, whether in books, postcards, or posters, has ranged from dreadful to adequate. Multiple factors compromised it, both technological and human. Among other sins of omission and commission, some photo editors have pumped up the original works’ colors, while some have cropped off parts of the pictures to achieve sharp, square edges. As a result, I witnessed the same scene repeatedly: Diebenkorn would receive a catalogue in the mail, open it, and exclaim loudly, and often profanely, that if they couldn’t get the color right, they should just print it in black and white. Even in the most meticulously produced museum catalogues and monographs, the color reproduction has been almost universally unsatisfactory. Twenty years ago, when Diebenkorn was around to see the images, the level of color control that is now possible with today’s digital tools simply did not exist.
As we gathered images from owners all over the world, we began to realize that these images’ variation in quality, and the inconsistency of color in even the most carefully made, would make it impossible to get the color right. We had begun to photograph all of the works still in the estate in 2003, working hard to attain accurate color. I owe a great debt to Steven Sloman, the much-revered New York art photographer, for his technical advice. With his guidance, we set off down a long road of constant upgrades in equipment and methodology that aided us in our creation of the most accurate color images possible. Information about some of the technical aspects of our process can be found in “Notes on Photography” in this volume.
By 2005 our images were already superior in many respects to the ones we were gathering from owners, even the photography departments of major museums. The key, we came to learn, is consistency. We took all of our shots with the same camera, lens, lights, and color target. Once we had gone through the tedious process of making a custom color correction mask (ICC profile) for each setup, when one picture was right, the rest of them would be too. Based on this realization, in February 2006, we made a fateful decision: we would rephotograph every Diebenkorn work in every location to which we could gain access. This allowed me, and my photography colleague, Carl Schmitz, to embark on an odyssey that has proven the most exciting and satisfying part of this project. We have been able to visit nearly every Diebenkorn work where it lives, whether in a museum, a gallery, a home, or an office. The places and collections we have seen stagger the imagination.
At the end of 2007 we formed the nonprofit Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, which serves as a permanent archive for the many works that the artist never intended to sell. Project staff and ownership of the catalogue raisonné content shifted from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—whose name, for their enormous assistance over the years, graces the spines of these volumes—to the foundation.
We are proud to publish the complete unique works of Richard Diebenkorn. The reproduction quality of these volumes is closer to the original art than we ever before thought possible. Although acknowledgments are printed elsewhere in this book, I want to take this opportunity to thank our entire team of writers, editors, and staff who together created this beautiful integration of new scholarship, written commentary, and art. The Diebenkorn family is indeed fortunate and grateful for their monumental effort.