Diebenkorn painted this suburban California street in 1963 when he moved away from making abstract work and returned to a more representational style, having become a leading figure of the Bay Area Figurative School. Cityscape I suggests that Diebenkorn's essentially abstract, signature style, comprised of large planes of bright color executed with expressive brushwork and plotted within a grid-like plane, extends even to his imagistic work. The planes - both the densely-packed planes of the buildings at the left as well as the larger, more open landscape planes at the right - stack up vertically to assert the flat surface of the picture and create its abstract design. Although at one level the painting is clearly a cityscape or landscape, at another level the viewer can cordon off almost any rectangular part of the picture to enjoy an almost totally abstract painting in miniature.

By Theartstore