Works of Richard Diebenkorn, Edgar Degas in Sonoma County

Sonoma County’s fine arts scene gets an extra boost this summer, peaking later this month with the Petaluma Arts Center’s breakout exhibit of early work by 19th-century French artist Edgar Degas.

The nearly seven-year-old center, housed in the former luggage depot of the city’s railroad station, will present its most ambitious exhibit yet this summer.

“Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist, Works on Paper by the Artist and His Circle,” featuring some 40 drawings, prints, pastels and photographs by the artist, runs June 20 through July 26.

And that’s not all the county has to offer art lovers this season. On Saturday, June 6, the Sonoma Valley Museum in Sonoma opens “The Intimate Diebenkorn,” with drawings, watercolors and collage by Richard Diebenkorn, internationally known California artist and longtime Healdsburg resident.

In Petaluma, the Degas exhibit marks a big step up for the arts center there, said Val Richman, its executive director since last year.

“I felt the Petaluma Arts Center hasn’t had the visibility it could have and should have,” she said. “An exhibit like the Degas show will change that, and create a buzz. It feels like a fresh day for us.”

Richman credits arts center supporter and gallery owner Joe McDonald, formerly with San Francisco’s de Young Museum, for making contact with art collector Robert Flynn Johnson, curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This exhibition of art from Johnson’s collection was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions in Los Angeles and Denenberg Fine Arts in Hollywood, and has toured internationally for a year. The show also includes another 60 works by other famous artists in Degas’ circle, including Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

“This will be an intimate, private look at the artists and their work, because the works are small, and much of the subject matter is family or friends,” Richman said. “There’s this wonderful drawing Degas did when he went to the Louvre with his friend, Mary Cassatt, and drew her from the back, gazing in admiration at some painting.”

Regarded as one of the founders of impressionism in the 19th century, Degas (1834-1917) preferred to be called a realist and has been called “the reluctant impressionist.”

Like Degas, Richard Diebenkorn was a pioneer who resisted labels. Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s and ’60s first as a West Coast leader in the abstract impressionism movement and later the Bay Area figurative moment.

Abstract impressionism emphasized expressing thoughts and feelings over more realistic portrayals of the world around us, said Kate Eilertsen, artistic director at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

Later, the figurative movement used the image of the human form as a starting point for more abstract work, she explained.

“The Bay Area figurative movement put Northern California on the art world map,” Eilertsen said. “It was hugely important.”

But Diebenkorn never stayed with one style or approach for too long, she added.

“Diebenkorn is one of the most important artists of our generation, and a hero of mine,” Eilertsen said. “I love the way he saw things, and his ability to change direction. He wasn’t afraid to move from one style to another. He moved on.”

The permanent collection at the de Young Museum in San Francisco includes work by Diebenkorn, and the de Young’s current exhibit, “Richard Diebenkorn Prints: Celebrating an Acquisition,” continues through Oct. 4.

While Diebenkorn is best known for his large paintings, particularly his “Ocean Park” series, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art exhibit focuses on his smaller works on paper.

“I think what this exhibit shows is his artistic process,” Eilertsen said. “He did drawings on the backs of papers when he was poor. He used crayons when he was trying to work out an idea for a painting.”

Diebenkorn kept an apartment in Berkeley, but in 1988, he and his wife Phyllis also started living in a house outside Healdsburg. The artist died 15 years later, in 1993. His legacy includes not only endless creativity, but wit, as well.

“One of the fun things about him is he wrote his ‘Notes to Self,’ a list of 10 rules, and some of them are funny,” Eilertsen said. “One is, ‘Tolerate chaos.’”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.