Cityscape #1

While living in Berkeley in the early 1960s, Richard Diebenkorn painted a group of representational canvases depicting views of the city and the surrounding landscape. Here, a street is fronted on one side by a row of low, nondescript buildings and on the other by open fields and empty lots. The horizon line is high, and the palette is dominated by cool hues of green, blue, gray, and white, offset by the sandy patch of earth on the right and a small area of red at the extreme left. Diebenkorn based the painting on an existing cityscape, but he left out all the buildings on the right side of the street, creating a flatter, more geometric composition.