Phyllis Diebenkorn was a partner in every way to the American painter Richard Diebenkorn. His wife and muse, she helped catalog and organize the artist's work over the span of their 50-year marriage.
Phyllis Gilman Diebenkorn, '42, died in her sleep at her San Francisco apartment on January 19. She was 93.
A native of Southern California, she enrolled at Stanford in 1939. A year later, Phyllis met Richard, '44, and they married before he joined the Marine Corps. After World War II, they returned to the Bay Area, where Richard used the GI Bill to study at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).
Phyllis completed her undergraduate work at the University of New Mexico while her husband finished a master's degree in painting. In 1953, the Diebenkorns settled in Berkeley. Phyllis was accepted into the doctoral program in psychology at UC-Berkeley and worked at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research.
Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, '67, MFA '69, said, "While my mother was very involved in the lab at UC-Berkeley, my father made it clear that his focus was on his art, and my mother agreed to go with him wherever he went. Where he wanted to live, what he wanted to learn, even how each house was going to look—this was all decided by him. Yet they were a very loving couple. She kept meticulous track of all of his art and exhibitions; they made a fascinating, complicated team."
The couple returned to Stanford in 1963, after Richard was invited to be artist-in-residence. Later, they moved to Santa Monica, where he taught at UCLA, and then to Healdsburg, Calif. Their final move, in 1992, brought them back to Berkeley, where Richard died the following year. Phyllis continued to promote her husband's legacy, helping with museum retrospectives of his work and founding the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation in Berkeley in 2007. The foundation's main project is to build a complete catalog of the artist's paintings and works on paper from 1922 to 1993, a compilation it expects will include nearly 700 oil paintings and close to 4,000 works on paper.
Richard Diebenkorn (U.S.A, 1922-1993), Untitled (Woman seated on striped chair), 1943-1993. Pen and ink on paper. Gift of Phyllis Diebenkorn, 2014.13.5. Copyright the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. Last year, Phyllis donated 26 of her late husband's sketchbooks to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, a collection containing upwards of 1,200 drawings. According to Connie Wolf, '81, director of Cantor, "Not only was Phyllis Richard's model—she features prominently in many of his drawings—but she recognized the important role that Stanford played in both her and Richard's lives, the university's focus on art history and its importance as a place of interdisciplinary learning." A selection of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks will be part of Artists at Work, an exhibition scheduled to open at Cantor this fall.
Phyllis Diebenkorn is survived by her children, Gretchen and Christopher; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Julie Muller Mitchell, '79, is a writer in San Francisco.
