Internationally regarded as a contemporary American master, Richard Diebenkorn was an artist whose career refused to fit into any one school or movement but can be most closely associated with the Expressionist Realism of the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Portland, Oregon, Diebenkorn attended the California School of Fine Arts, studying under Elmer Bischoff and David Park and visiting artists Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt. In the late forties, when Diebenkorn was a student, abstraction was the dominant mode in art, no matter how you chose to interpret it.

Early in the 1950s, Diebenkorn followed the lead of Bischoff and Park in turning more to representation. He began to paint isolated figures in architectural spaces, leading a critic to note that Diebenkorn was an abstract painter who now painted figures and landscapes. Where he had been painting broad, simply conceived compositions with an emphasis on brush texture, color, space, he now introduced an asymmetrically placed figure or group of figures. Maintaining a structure based on verticals and horizontals, the artist now used these elements as directional lines which converge on the figures, creating a tension between geometric and organic form.

More recently, Diebenkorn once again abandoned the figure to return to pure geometric abstraction, such as with his Ocean Park series.

Man and Woman Seated is an important canvas dating from Diebenkorn's figurative period. The painting was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition New Images of Man in New York in 1959, one year after its completion.