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Lot Essay
Richard Diebenkorn’s Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad is a groundbreaking painting that celebrates his admiration for the work of Henri Matisse and the profound effect the French master’s paintings had on his own career. Previously only encountered through books, in the 1960s Diebenkorn made a rare trip to the Soviet Union where he saw dozens of Matisse’s paintings in person. This momentous encounter began Diebenkorn’s move towards the new abstracted planes of rich and vibrant color that would result in his iconic Ocean Park canvases. Not only is this particular painting an homage to Matisse, it also documents the tectonic shifts that were taking place in the wider art world at the time, as the influence of abstraction was beginning to wain with the emergence of Pop Art. Seeing the work of Matisse firsthand encouraged Diebenkorn to challenge the existing hegemony and pursue the emergence of his new artistic vocabulary. Widely published (including on the cover of the 2016 exhibition catalogue for Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art), and extensively exhibited around the world, this sumptuous canvas becomes a painting about painting, and celebrates two of the twentieth century’s most avant-garde artists.
Across the surface of this monumental canvas evidence emerges of the new direction which Matisse’s influence had prompted in Diebenkorn’s work. Gone is the dynamic brushwork that the American artist had employed to manipulate the fields of organic color in his Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and Berkeley paintings of the 1950s. Also absent are the figures that he had introduced into his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s, replaced instead by bold geometric planes of jewel-like color. Depth and perspective are still present, but in a much diminished form. Bisected by a series of strong vertical lines, the composition of the present work appears to be a highly abstracted view of a landscape as viewed through a window. In the distance, blocks of verdant green, warm cream, and azure blue evoke a lawn, beach and deep ocean respectively, while a highly abstracted floral pattern is carefully rendered in the upper left quadrant.
Diebenkorn had already explored the idea of interior versus exterior space in a number of paintings dating from the late 1950s. In works such as Coffee (1959, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Woman on a Porch (1956, New Orleans Museum of Art), the artist began to merge figurative and abstract elements into one composition by tempering the traditional use of linear perspective. In the present work however, he goes a step further and uses his bold fields of color to the extreme, flattening the composition to a greater extent. In this matter, he was using references that Matisse had employed in the early part of the twentieth century in Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Tangiers: Landscape seen through a Window (1912, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), taking them to their ultimate compositional conclusion. In the latter example, Matisse’s strong framework of black lines against a brushy blue ground has clear parallels in Diebenkorn’s later Ocean Park paintings that were the direct of result of Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad.
The highly decorative floral curlicues that populate the upper left quadrant of the present work can be read as a direct reference to one of most famous of the Matisse’s paintings, and a canvas which Diebenkorn saw firsthand during his visit to Leningrad. Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1908) is one of the French artist’s most radical paintings, and—like the present work—it is a striking essay on treatment of interior and exterior space. Like Diebenkorn, Matisse’s conflation of interior and exterior space results in a striking composition in which subsequent compositional elements are pushed forward, almost out through the picture plane. In Matisse’s painting this is enhanced by his audacious use of red pigment, while for Diebenkorn his blocks of rich colors are overlaid with a trellis of curvaceous serpentine forms. The American artist elevates Matisse’s motif by tracing a much more capricious route, with pronounced twists and turns. Diebenkorn also introduces more distinct tendrils, some of which end with flowers that resemble bursts of color, resulting in a highly pattered, almost Nabis-like, density of decoration.
The artist’s 1964 visit to the Soviet Union was made at the invitation of the U.S. State Department as part of a cultural exchange initiated by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev. As abstraction was something of an anathema to Russian artists raised on a state approved diet of Socialist Realism, Diebenkorn was a natural choice due the well-regarded figurative works that he was engaged with at the time. He was officially a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union and spent much of his time visiting various art schools and meeting with fellow artists. However, he also took the opportunity to visit some of the greatest collections of his favorite artist, Henri Matisse, particularly those of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
Both museums contained works that had once belonged to the famed collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, before the paintings were seized by the state in 1917. Subsequently, they were divided up between the two institutions and are now regarded as being two of the finest collections of Matisse’s work in existence. Diebenkorn had seen Matisse’s work reproduced in books, and in limited quantities in U.S. museums, but it was his visit to Leningrad (now known as Saint Petersburg) that arguably had the greatest effect on him. He was given a private tour through the Hermitage galleries and was also allowed to examine many works that weren’t on public display. His state department companion recalled at the time that the artist “lingered [over] and pondered longest, the Matisse paintings” (W. Luers quoted by K. Rothkopf, in J. Bishop and K. Rothkopf, Matisse/Diebenkorn, exh. cat. Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016, p. 120). Diebenkorn later recalled that this experience was “the highpoint of going through the Soviet Union” (R. Diebenkorn, ibid.); the visit clearly had a major impact on the artist as it directly inspired Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad painted just a few months later.
Although separated by over half a century, there are common threads that run through the careers of both Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Matisse. They were both artists who constantly sought to reinvent themselves, and both possessed what has been described as “a strong commitment to exploration and shrugging off expectation” (K. Rothkopf, “Richard Diebenkorn and Matisse, from Russia to Ocean Park,” in J. Bishop and K. Rothkopf, Matisse/Diebenkorn, exh. cat. Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016, p. 117). The pair also shared a love—and consummate understanding of—color and structure, along with an interest in technique, particularly the layering, scrapping away adding paint to achieve the architectural qualities that infuse many of their compositions.
While often discussed as a member of the West Coast branch of Abstract Expressionism, especially in relation to his Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and Berkeley paintings which he began in the late 1940s, Diebenkorn was also a critical founding member of the movement that would become known as Bay Area Figuration. Along with his colleagues David Park and Elmer Bischoff, the artist started introducing human forms into his abstractions beginning in 1955. “As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of painting changed”, said Diebenkorn. “Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself—in a way that I welcomed ... In abstract painting one can’t deal with ... an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn’t in the painting ... And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be ... in extreme conflict” (R. Diebenkorn, tape-recorded interview with S. Larsen, May 1, 1985, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 3).
"One of the most interesting polarities in art is between representation at one end of the stick, and abstraction at the other end, and I’ve found myself all over that stick."
Richard Diebenkorn
Throughout his career, Diebenkorn shifted approaches: he moved from his abstract paintings to figurative scenes in 1955, and then—following his visit to the Soviet Union—transitioned again in the mid-1960s to the abstract Ocean Park series. Unbeholden to any strict movement or school, he was a boldly independent artist, constantly evaluating and re-evaluating his own work in order to evolve. “If you don’t assume a rigid historical mission,” he reflected, “you have infinitely more freedom. One of the most interesting polarities in art is between representation at one end of the stick, and abstraction at the other end, and I’ve found myself all over that stick” (R. Diebenkorn quoted in S. Bancroft, Richard Diebenkorn: A Riotous Calm, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015, p. 17).
The resulting Ocean Park paintings would become the pinnacle of his career. In one memorable review, John Russell—art critic of the New York Times—remarked that Diebenkorn’s paintings were “one of the most majestic pictorial achievements of the second half the century, in this country or anywhere else” (J. Russell in S. C. Bancroft, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 2012, p.233). Beginning in 1968 and continuing for the next 18 years, Diebenkorn would produce no fewer than 145 paintings in this series. His paintings from the early 1970s (including those which trace their lineage to his Leningrad visit and the present work) are regarded as some of his most considered, and several other Ocean Park paintings from this period are contained in major museum collections including Ocean Park #45 (1971) in the Art Institute of Chicago and Ocean Park #79 (1972) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The present work is an important painting within Diebenkorn’s oeuvre and has been widely exhibited in a number of important retrospectives of the artist’s work, including the seminal Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976 organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and which later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The work was also illustrated on the cover of the catalogue for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s critically acclaimed Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition in 2016, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The painting also comes with exceptional provenance; the present owner acquired the painting in 1969, becoming its first and only owner. It has been on view at the Crocker Museum in California for a number of years, where it was the centerpiece of their celebrated postwar American art collection.
Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad marks a pivotal point in the artist’s career, and that of postwar art in general. Through his encounters with the work of Paul Cezanne, Piet Mondrian, Pierre Bonnard and ultimately Henri Matisse, Diebenkorn witnessed the march towards abstraction—from Cezanne’s collapsing and juxtaposing foreground and background, to Matisse's organization of space within geometric scaffolds. However, Diebenkorn tempered the influence of European modernism with the early 20th-century American master Edward Hopper as well as his fellow countrymen’s Abstract Expressionist zeal. He was especially inspired by Abstract Expressionism’s rhetoric about the process of creation, nonetheless from the beginning of his career Diebenkorn's work was always unquestionably his own—and, as can be seen in the present work, his masterful painterly touch and unrivalled use of color distinguishes him from peers and predecessors alike.
Across the surface of this monumental canvas evidence emerges of the new direction which Matisse’s influence had prompted in Diebenkorn’s work. Gone is the dynamic brushwork that the American artist had employed to manipulate the fields of organic color in his Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and Berkeley paintings of the 1950s. Also absent are the figures that he had introduced into his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s, replaced instead by bold geometric planes of jewel-like color. Depth and perspective are still present, but in a much diminished form. Bisected by a series of strong vertical lines, the composition of the present work appears to be a highly abstracted view of a landscape as viewed through a window. In the distance, blocks of verdant green, warm cream, and azure blue evoke a lawn, beach and deep ocean respectively, while a highly abstracted floral pattern is carefully rendered in the upper left quadrant.
Diebenkorn had already explored the idea of interior versus exterior space in a number of paintings dating from the late 1950s. In works such as Coffee (1959, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Woman on a Porch (1956, New Orleans Museum of Art), the artist began to merge figurative and abstract elements into one composition by tempering the traditional use of linear perspective. In the present work however, he goes a step further and uses his bold fields of color to the extreme, flattening the composition to a greater extent. In this matter, he was using references that Matisse had employed in the early part of the twentieth century in Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Tangiers: Landscape seen through a Window (1912, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), taking them to their ultimate compositional conclusion. In the latter example, Matisse’s strong framework of black lines against a brushy blue ground has clear parallels in Diebenkorn’s later Ocean Park paintings that were the direct of result of Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad.
The highly decorative floral curlicues that populate the upper left quadrant of the present work can be read as a direct reference to one of most famous of the Matisse’s paintings, and a canvas which Diebenkorn saw firsthand during his visit to Leningrad. Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1908) is one of the French artist’s most radical paintings, and—like the present work—it is a striking essay on treatment of interior and exterior space. Like Diebenkorn, Matisse’s conflation of interior and exterior space results in a striking composition in which subsequent compositional elements are pushed forward, almost out through the picture plane. In Matisse’s painting this is enhanced by his audacious use of red pigment, while for Diebenkorn his blocks of rich colors are overlaid with a trellis of curvaceous serpentine forms. The American artist elevates Matisse’s motif by tracing a much more capricious route, with pronounced twists and turns. Diebenkorn also introduces more distinct tendrils, some of which end with flowers that resemble bursts of color, resulting in a highly pattered, almost Nabis-like, density of decoration.
The artist’s 1964 visit to the Soviet Union was made at the invitation of the U.S. State Department as part of a cultural exchange initiated by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev. As abstraction was something of an anathema to Russian artists raised on a state approved diet of Socialist Realism, Diebenkorn was a natural choice due the well-regarded figurative works that he was engaged with at the time. He was officially a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union and spent much of his time visiting various art schools and meeting with fellow artists. However, he also took the opportunity to visit some of the greatest collections of his favorite artist, Henri Matisse, particularly those of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
Both museums contained works that had once belonged to the famed collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, before the paintings were seized by the state in 1917. Subsequently, they were divided up between the two institutions and are now regarded as being two of the finest collections of Matisse’s work in existence. Diebenkorn had seen Matisse’s work reproduced in books, and in limited quantities in U.S. museums, but it was his visit to Leningrad (now known as Saint Petersburg) that arguably had the greatest effect on him. He was given a private tour through the Hermitage galleries and was also allowed to examine many works that weren’t on public display. His state department companion recalled at the time that the artist “lingered [over] and pondered longest, the Matisse paintings” (W. Luers quoted by K. Rothkopf, in J. Bishop and K. Rothkopf, Matisse/Diebenkorn, exh. cat. Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016, p. 120). Diebenkorn later recalled that this experience was “the highpoint of going through the Soviet Union” (R. Diebenkorn, ibid.); the visit clearly had a major impact on the artist as it directly inspired Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad painted just a few months later.
Although separated by over half a century, there are common threads that run through the careers of both Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Matisse. They were both artists who constantly sought to reinvent themselves, and both possessed what has been described as “a strong commitment to exploration and shrugging off expectation” (K. Rothkopf, “Richard Diebenkorn and Matisse, from Russia to Ocean Park,” in J. Bishop and K. Rothkopf, Matisse/Diebenkorn, exh. cat. Baltimore Museum of Art, 2016, p. 117). The pair also shared a love—and consummate understanding of—color and structure, along with an interest in technique, particularly the layering, scrapping away adding paint to achieve the architectural qualities that infuse many of their compositions.
While often discussed as a member of the West Coast branch of Abstract Expressionism, especially in relation to his Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana, and Berkeley paintings which he began in the late 1940s, Diebenkorn was also a critical founding member of the movement that would become known as Bay Area Figuration. Along with his colleagues David Park and Elmer Bischoff, the artist started introducing human forms into his abstractions beginning in 1955. “As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of painting changed”, said Diebenkorn. “Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself—in a way that I welcomed ... In abstract painting one can’t deal with ... an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn’t in the painting ... And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be ... in extreme conflict” (R. Diebenkorn, tape-recorded interview with S. Larsen, May 1, 1985, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 3).
"One of the most interesting polarities in art is between representation at one end of the stick, and abstraction at the other end, and I’ve found myself all over that stick."
Richard Diebenkorn
Throughout his career, Diebenkorn shifted approaches: he moved from his abstract paintings to figurative scenes in 1955, and then—following his visit to the Soviet Union—transitioned again in the mid-1960s to the abstract Ocean Park series. Unbeholden to any strict movement or school, he was a boldly independent artist, constantly evaluating and re-evaluating his own work in order to evolve. “If you don’t assume a rigid historical mission,” he reflected, “you have infinitely more freedom. One of the most interesting polarities in art is between representation at one end of the stick, and abstraction at the other end, and I’ve found myself all over that stick” (R. Diebenkorn quoted in S. Bancroft, Richard Diebenkorn: A Riotous Calm, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015, p. 17).
The resulting Ocean Park paintings would become the pinnacle of his career. In one memorable review, John Russell—art critic of the New York Times—remarked that Diebenkorn’s paintings were “one of the most majestic pictorial achievements of the second half the century, in this country or anywhere else” (J. Russell in S. C. Bancroft, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, exh. cat., Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, 2012, p.233). Beginning in 1968 and continuing for the next 18 years, Diebenkorn would produce no fewer than 145 paintings in this series. His paintings from the early 1970s (including those which trace their lineage to his Leningrad visit and the present work) are regarded as some of his most considered, and several other Ocean Park paintings from this period are contained in major museum collections including Ocean Park #45 (1971) in the Art Institute of Chicago and Ocean Park #79 (1972) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The present work is an important painting within Diebenkorn’s oeuvre and has been widely exhibited in a number of important retrospectives of the artist’s work, including the seminal Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976 organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and which later traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The work was also illustrated on the cover of the catalogue for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s critically acclaimed Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition in 2016, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The painting also comes with exceptional provenance; the present owner acquired the painting in 1969, becoming its first and only owner. It has been on view at the Crocker Museum in California for a number of years, where it was the centerpiece of their celebrated postwar American art collection.
Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad marks a pivotal point in the artist’s career, and that of postwar art in general. Through his encounters with the work of Paul Cezanne, Piet Mondrian, Pierre Bonnard and ultimately Henri Matisse, Diebenkorn witnessed the march towards abstraction—from Cezanne’s collapsing and juxtaposing foreground and background, to Matisse's organization of space within geometric scaffolds. However, Diebenkorn tempered the influence of European modernism with the early 20th-century American master Edward Hopper as well as his fellow countrymen’s Abstract Expressionist zeal. He was especially inspired by Abstract Expressionism’s rhetoric about the process of creation, nonetheless from the beginning of his career Diebenkorn's work was always unquestionably his own—and, as can be seen in the present work, his masterful painterly touch and unrivalled use of color distinguishes him from peers and predecessors alike.