In 1966, after accepting a teaching position at UCLA, Richard Diebenkorn began working in a studio near the beach in Santa Monica's Ocean Park neighborhood. The artist soon embarked on a new cycle of paintings and drawings, collectively known as the Ocean Park works.

The light and architecture of the beach community had a profound influence on Diebenkorn's style and imagery. He abandoned his figurative vocabulary and invented an abstract language, partially reverting to his early interest in landscape-based abstraction, but rendered from an aerial perspective. Diebenkorn extrapolated the internal architecture of his Ocean Park works from the stark compositions of two paintings by Henri Matisse: View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure.

In this three-part work from 1972, Diebenkorn pares his Ocean Park imagery down to its most essential components. Executed in monochrome, except for the third (green) panel, Untitled is the artistís homage to the austerity of Matisse's window paintings. Realizing the centrality of this triptych to his oeuvre, Diebenkorn kept it in the living room of his Santa Monica home, a touchstone of his quarter-century-long Ocean Park series.