Enjoy this gold framed print of Richard Diebenkorn's Berkeley No. 52. Take a piece of the National Gallery home with you.  Measures 13"x 13".

Diebenkorn's career spanned some four decades and culminated with a 25-year reign as one of America's preeminent abstract painters. The source of this reputation was his "Ocean Park" paintings, a series begun around 1967 after the artist set up his studio in the eponymous section of Venice, Ca. Celebrated as brilliant compositions of color and paint, the Ocean Park paintings are loose and structured, architectonic and robust, moody and bright. Each canvas is episodic, a transcription, if you will, of a day in the life of the artist.

Diebenkorn's strength lay in the elegance of his abstractions. He had a gift for creating compositions around beautiful, sensually drawn lines. Diebenkorn's charm is his draftsmanship, a line which can delineate shapes within the canvas while being a substantial character in its own right.

The "Berkeley Series", begun in 1956, opened the door to the application of paint in a manner inspired by landscape and the figure. Something like de Kooning's "parkway pictures," these works are both referential and abstract. The light and color and rhythm of this northern California city became the subtext of abundant and handsomely painted compositions. Most importantly, with this series Diebenkorn moves further into painting per se, further into working through the various qualities of the paint itself. What seems to naturally evolve out of the abstract swirls and diagonal passages of the Berkeley works are the representational images that help launch the Bay Area figurative school.