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Duncan and Marjorie Phillips first became interested in Diebenkorn's figurative works at the urging of Duncan's nephew, Gifford Phillips, who in the early 1950s became one of the artist's foremost patrons. After purchasing Interior with View of the Ocean in 1957, Duncan Phillips gave Diebenkorn his first East Coast solo museum show for which Gifford Phillips wrote the catalogue. Diebenkorn represented a continuation of the tradition upon which the Phillips’s collection was based—composing images and communicating personal expression through contrasts and subtle variations of pure color, the legacy of Cézanne, Matisse, and Bonnard. Because Diebenkorn serves as one of the cornerstone artists of the Collection, the choice to open the Goh Annex in 1989 with a retrospective of the artist's works on paper was an especially easy and appropriate one.
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