California Painting: 40 Painters

Organized by the Municipal Art Center, Long Beach, with the San Francisco Museum of Art, and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, D.C.

Curated by Samuel Heavenrich and Grace L. McCann Morley

A catalogue was published on occasion of the exhibition.

After the first venue, the exhibition was titled California Painting.

“‘What I paint often seems to pertain to landscape but I try to avoid any rationalization of this either in my painting or in later thinking about it. I’m not a landscape painter (at this time, at any rate) or I would paint landscape directly.

‘I don’t object to verbalizing about painting or feel that words damage it. I am simply aware of and (with my first paragraph in mind) wary of the scant and often absurb [sic] relationship between painters’ works and their verbal stances and self-justifications.’” —Richard Diebenkorn, exhibition catalogue for “California Painting: 40 Painters” (1956)