Richard Diebenkorn was one of the most significant Abstract Expressionists of the 20th century, bringing a distinctly West Coast sensibility to the movement. His works are in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Whitney.

During a period of eighteen months from 1981-1982, Richard Diebenkorn produced a series of works on paper of clubs and spades. These works recalled his childhood fixation with drawing the symbols on homemade shields as heraldic insignia and devices. Diebenkorn would continually refer to chivalric motifs and the medieval imagery of knights. As Curtis Brown notes, Diebenkorn's interest in the clubs and spades likely stems more from the associations with this iconography than any reference to playing cards.

"In 1981 I did accept both a theme and a motif in the form of the black playing card pips, clubs and spades. I had used these signs in my work almost from my beginnings, but always peripherally, incidentally, and perhaps whimsically...I discovered that these symbols had for me a much greater emotional charge than I realized. I had intended to involve myself with them only briefly but found that their impetus kept me with them almost a year and a half." - Richard Diebenkorn

Though the 'clubs and spades' period would be only a brief moment in Diebenkorn's oeuvre, he would reuse the motifs of clubs and spades until the end of his life. In January 1982, Knoedler & Co. held an exhibition of works from this period, including the present work, for which Diebenkorn and his wife, Phyllis, travelled to New York.

Critics were slightly puzzled and surprised by this new development in Diebenkorn's oeuvre, which emerged just after his famed abstracted 'Ocean Park' series for which he is now most widely known. As Robert Hughes wrote in his exhibition review for Time Magazine, "It is Diebenkorn’s way of breaking up the remote geometry of the Ocean Parks; one no longer sees a distant “view” of a whole terrain, but moves closer, toward this lobed and writhing emblem which suggests either a body or still life."