He was at California College of Fine Arts when Clifford Still was there. Dick was not enamored of Still. When they played catch with a baseball, Dick threw it hard when Still wasn’t wearing a glove. Dick did not emulate Newman at all. Motherwell was a friend (they both emerged from Stanford University at different times) but Dick did not pursue Motherwell’s calligraphic approach that flowed from gentrifying Pollock. Dick’s work touched base with Matisse and Mondrian.

“Interior with View of Buildings” (1962) owes to Matisse’s “Interior with Goldfish” (1914), now up at the Museum of Modern Art New York in an exceptionally important exhibit “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917.” Dick was intellectually intrigued with the monumental struggle toward reduction that Matisse engaged during World War I after two trips to Tangiers, ending in 1912. Diebenkorn’s “Interior with View of Buildings” was only one of several pieces wherein Diebenkorn explored the operations within Matisse’s painting. The reflecting oval of the magnifying glass on the table echoes two in Matisse; the sketchy chair two in Matisse; the black interior was common to both; the minimalist exterior buildings cast in light shared by both. In another version of the interior of Matisse’s studio at 19 Quai Saint-Michel Matisse included his own paintings on the wall., as Dick did in his own painting. Another view during the same year from the same window by Matisse in the opposite direction, “View of Notre Dame” (1914) became the progenitor of Dick’s Ocean Park paintings.

Dick did not put Surrealist tropes in his paintings. Admiring artists’s works, such as those by Diebenkorn or Matisse, fundamentally both invites and confers a responsibility to understand more deeply than the surface the structure, issues, and meanings of the works. Satisfaction with only the surface rhetoric might have its pleasures, even if they are as Duchamp termed them only “retinal.” Deeper undertsanding would reveal ideological discussions and cultural advances that, for the artists, were probably closert to theology than to anything else.