Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life.

The beginning of the United States's involvement in World War II interrupted Deibenkorn's education at Stanford, and he was not able complete his degree at that time.

[7] While enlisted, Diebenkorn continued to study art and expanded his knowledge of European modernism, first while enrolled briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, and later on the East Coast, while stationed at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia.

Neuhaus emigrated from Germany in 1904 and was a seminal figure in establishing the Bay Area as a center of art appreciation and education on the West Coast.

[9] On the East Coast, when he transferred to the base in Quantico, Diebenkorn took advantage of his location to visit art museums in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York City.

This allowed him to study in person the paintings of modern masters such as Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.

[8] During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn lived and worked in various places: San Francisco and Sausalito (1946–47 and 1947–1950), Woodstock, New York (1947), Albuquerque, New Mexico (1950–1952), Urbana, Illinois (1952–53), and Berkeley, California (1953–1966).

In 1947, after ten months in Woodstock on an Alfred Bender travel grant, Diebenkorn returned to the CSFA, where he adopted abstract expressionism as his vehicle for self-expression.

[12][13] In September 1953, Diebenkorn moved to back to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he had spent the summer.

[20] In September 1963, Diebenkorn was named the first artist-in-residence at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, an appointment that lasted until June 1964.

[21] From fall 1964 to spring 1965, Diebenkorn traveled through Europe, and he was granted a cultural visa to visit important Soviet museums and view their holdings of Matisse's paintings.

According to art historian Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn saw both Matisse paintings in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, which enormously affected him and his work.

[24] Livingston said about the January 1966 Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles, It is difficult not to ascribe enormous weight to this experience for the direction his work took from that time on.

[29] After traveling and looking around several different areas in the western United States, in 1988, Diebenkorn and his wife settled in Healdsburg, California, where he built a new studio.

The first important retrospective of his work took place at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1976–77; the show, then traveled to Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

In 1989, John Elderfield, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized a show of Diebenkorn's works on paper, which constituted an important part of his production.

[37] The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University is home to 29 of Diebenkorn's sketchbooks as well as a collection of paintings and other works on paper.

[citation needed] In 2018, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #126 painted in 1984 became the most expensive picture by the artist auctioned when it went for $23.9 million at Christie's New York.

[41][42] At a 2014 Sotheby's sale of Rachel Lambert Mellon's private collection, Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani bought Ocean Park #89 (1975), an abstract image of a sunset, for $9.68 million.

[43] Author William Benton made a painting in the style of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park for a friend who was a big admirer of the artist's work.