Internationally acclaimed artist Richard Diebenkorn lived in Albuquerque from 1950 to 1952, where he executed an impressive body of more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and welded-metal sculpture. Until recently much of Diebenkorn's New Mexico work remained forgotten. With his coming to New Mexico, Diebenkorn moved toward a kind of painting that, although rigorous and considered, emits energies of freedom, freshness, and spontaneity and has inferences of landscape. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of this New Mexico period and investigates the critical role it played in Diebenkorn's exploration of the idiom of abstraction and the maturation of his art. It also demonstrates how New Mexico's desert landscape and light affected Diebenkorn's artistic route toward figurative painting and the landscape-inspired abstractions of his greatly acclaimed Ocean Park series. This book offers not only stunning reproductions of the artist's work but also important new research into the life of one of the creative giants of the second half of the twentieth century.