The Modern Art Notes Podcast

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast is all about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, which is surveyed in a major exhibition that opens this weekend at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. First, exhibition curator Sarah Bancroft talks about how the work came to be and what makes it great; next, conservator Ana Alba discusses her new research into the Ocean Park series — and why some of the paintings from certain parts of the series are having condition issues.

Bancroft is a curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, where the exhibition was shown this spring. (The show was co-organized by the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, where it debuted last fall. I reviewed the MAMFW presentation here.) Previously she was a curator of the OCMA’s 2010 California Biennial, and the co-curator (with Walter Hopps) of the Guggenheim’s 2003 James Rosenquist retrospective.

Alba is a conservation fellow in modern paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She started her work on Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings while at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden when she was a paintings conservation intern. In May she presented her research on the Ocean Park series at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works’s annual conference in Albuquerque.

To download the program directly, click here. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. To see lots of images of the works discussed on the show, click here.

Image: Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #116, 1979. Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.