Richard Diebenkorn, Renowned Painter, Dies : Art: California modernist was a leading influence. He had been in failing health since heart surgery.

Richard Diebenkorn, arguably the most historically and aesthetically important modernist painter to come out of California, died Tuesday. He was 70.

Diebenkorn, internationally known for his blending of Abstract Expressionism and American realism, died en route to a hospital in Berkeley, said Lawrence Rubin, president of New York’s M. Knoedler & Co. The company had been Diebenkorn’s dealer since 1975.

Rubin said that Diebenkorn’s health had degenerated steadily since he underwent surgery for a heart aneurysm four years ago, and that he had been hospitalized several times. Diebenkorn, who lived near Healdsburg in Northern California, suffered respiratory arrest on his way to the hospital about 11 a.m., Rubin said.

“I think he was one of America’s greatest artists. I don’t think there was any doubt about that,” said Rubin, who last sponsored a Diebenkorn exhibition in November, 1991. “He was also a marvelous man.”

Rubin said Diebenkorn had been painting and creating small etchings until a short time ago.

Diebenkorn was in many ways California’s quiet revolutionary. He achieved two major feats in the annals of contemporary painting--melding Abstract Expressionism with images of real people and expanding the tradition of Western painting.

In the post-World War II period, the United States emerged as a leading power in art, predominantly through the fabled New York School, with abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

By the mid-1950s, this abstract art started to seem too rhetorical. Artists were looking for a way to reintroduce the humanism of the figure. Diebenkorn, then working in the Bay Area, managed to blend the energy of Abstract Expressionism with contemplative images of people living in a world still beautiful but deeply troubled by the threat of nuclear holocaust.

A central image of the period was his 1956 “Girl on a Terrace.”

Such paintings, in addition to Diebenkorn’s superb drawings, inspired other artists, giving them courage to deal with humanistic issues in an abstract world. That was his first triumph.

By the 1960s, the world was awash in go-go art, the Pop era of Andy Warhol’s enigmatic soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip images. Diebenkorn was not interested. He preferred furthering the great tradition of Western painting.

In 1966 he accepted a post as an art professor at UCLA and moved south, setting up a studio in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park district. There he began his “Ocean Park Series.”

He appeared to return to abstractionism in these paintings, but any protracted examination of them shows they were responses to his surroundings--the interior of his studio, the lawns and ramshackle architecture of the neighborhood. He continued the series until the early ‘80s.

Diebenkorn embodied the California aesthetic perhaps more clearly that anyone, in a place where the dynamic tradition of Euro-American culture meets the contemplative Asian tradition on the shores of the Pacific. From the Beat Generation poets to L.A.’s light and space artists, the goal has been to reconcile the ruminative with the progressive. The most original California art is a synthesis. Diebenkorn’s genius lay in that capacity to blend.

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn was born April 22, 1922, in Portland, Ore. His father was a sales executive who moved the family to San Francisco in 1924. Diebenkorn attended Stanford University as a liberal arts major. He was drafted into the Marines in 1943, shortly after his marriage to Phyllis Gilman. During World War II he served as a map maker, which probably influenced the look of his later art.

After the war, he attended the California School of Arts and Crafts, where he met artists David Park and Elmer Bishoff. Those colleagues later joined him in founding the school of Bay Area figurative art.

Diebenkorn had his first New York solo exhibition in 1956, and his first retrospective at the old Pasadena Art Museum in 1960. After that his reputation was never seriously questioned. In 1978 he established his place in international art circles, representing the United States at the Venice Biennale.

In 1989 admirers saw a drawing retrospective organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Last year a painting retrospective organized by London’s Whitechapel Gallery visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A survey of his works on paper is currently on view at USC’s Fischer Gallery.

Diebenkorn dismissed accusations that he shrewdly manipulated his own career by saying, “I really don’t pay a lot of attention. If someone wants to do a show and they seem decent and thoughtful, I just say, ‘All right’ and let them do it. I want to be in the studio.”

Although Diebenkorn consciously avoided the pressure-cooker of the New York art world, his appearance and lifestyle was very much that of the understated Eastern patrician. He liked baggy corduroy pants and sweaters and shunned the hip bohemian manners of some Venice artists.

He thought carefully about everything he said and heard in conversation and would often return to a remark days later to amend a word or two. It was a reflection of the way he worked. Among the most fastidious of artists, he would linger over a canvas for months, wiping out, over-painting and making subtle shifts. He would then take even longer to decide if a picture should leave the studio.

“When I go someplace where there is a bad (painting),” he said in a recent interview, “it doesn’t matter how many good ones are around or if the thing is 40 years old. My eye goes right to that bollix.”

In 1988 Diebenkorn moved back north to an idyllic pastoral spread dating from the 1880s near the small wine country town of Healdsburg. Progressively weakened after the heart aneurysm, he nonetheless spent three hours a day in the studio and took a couple of vodkas before dinner.

He remained an affectionately admired figure among the sometimes ferociously competitive Venice artists he had come to know in his Ocean Park days. In a recent profile of the artist they tended to fasten on his extraordinary working habits.

Sculptor Robert Graham remembered Diebenkorn’s intense discipline in the studio: “I once saw a transistor radio in the corner. He said he just had to listen to the Watergate hearings. He clearly felt guilty about the indulgence.”

Artist Tony Berlant said, “His art is about man’s confrontation with nature.”

Diebenkorn’s old friend and teaching colleague William Brice said, “He is absolutely passionate in belief. And open.”

“His painting is like human intuition,” commented painter Ed Moses. “It is a window of opportunity on the Big Thought.”

Diebenkorn is survived by his wife; a son and daughter, Christopher Diebenkorn and Gretchen Grant, both of San Francisco; and two grandchildren, Phyllis and Benjamin Grant, who are students in New York.

The family has asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Stanford University Museum of Art.