When Richard Diebenkorn encountered Matisse: how a visit to the Soviet Union forever changed the American painter

Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant distinctly remembers mealtime with her father, the eminent American post-war artist Richard Diebenkorn. ‘Oftentimes after dinner, he would look at art books if he wasn’t drawing himself,’ she recalls. He had an extensive collection. ‘He would just sit there looking at them and relooking at them and marking them so that he could find something again later.’

As a lifelong student of art history, Diebenkorn reinvented his oeuvre time and time again, taking cues from the numerous artists such as Paul Cezanne and Piet Mondrian, who inspired his own journey from figuration and landscape to abstraction. ‘My father loved painting, and he loved people who obviously loved painting themselves,’ Diebenkorn Grant adds.

On 9 November at Christie’s New York, the 20th Century Evening Sale will feature a painting that Diebenkorn Grant says ‘epitomises my father’s love of Henri Matisse’s work’. Painted in 1965 shortly after Diebenkorn visited the Soviet Union, where he saw many of the French artist’s masterpieces for the first time in person, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad is one of Diebenkorn’s most visually stunning and historically significant works.

Residing in the same private collection since it was acquired in 1969, this ground-breaking canvas has been widely exhibited and published, including on the cover of the catalogue for the critically acclaimed 2016 exhibition Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Then based in Berkeley, Diebenkorn was invited by the State Department to visit the Soviet Union in 1964 as part of the US-USSR cultural exchange program, which had been renewed by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in 1963. The United States Information Agency deemed Diebenkorn an apt painter to engage with the local ‘socialist realist’ artists because at the time he was one of the few prominent American artists who was not working in abstraction, which Soviet authorities staunchly opposed.

William ‘Bill’ Luers was serving in the United States Foreign Service in Moscow, and after accompanying distinguished writers including Edward Albee, John Steinbeck and John Updike on their cultural tours to the Soviet Union, he was the primary host and tour guide to Diebenkorn and his wife, Phyllis, for the artist’s first significant trip abroad. ‘The trip shook him up a bit,’ Luers tells Christie’s. ‘Visiting the Soviet Union was not a pleasant place to be. It was not an alternative to Paris.’

As part of the tour, Diebenkorn visited many artist studios and cultural institutions, including the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. The latter, which had more than 60 Matisse paintings and drawings, promised to be a highlight for the American artist, who had only seen black and white reproductions of these world-famous works.

The morning of their visit to the Hermitage, however, Luers and Diebenkorn learned that Khrushchev had unexpectedly left office. Upon their arrival, the museum director pressed Luers on how this drastic political change would impact both nations. According to Luers, Diebenkorn grew increasingly distressed for fear he might not get to see the highly anticipated works of one of his favourite painters. ‘Having been delayed, we went directly to the Matisses,’ remembers Luers. ‘Dick was not a loquacious person. He walked through the collection and stopped without saying anything. He just stared at the works, soaking them up.’

‘This was an extraordinary event in his life,’ says Diebenkorn Grant. Her husband, Richard Grant, Executive Director of the Diebenkorn Foundation, adds, ‘Everything Richard Diebenkorn did, he did intensely: seeing, talking, but also listening.’ The artist’s process entailed intense solitude, time, and evaluation. ‘He spent hours sitting in that chair looking at the work he was doing, and sometimes a long time went by before he picked up the brush again,’ says Grant.

His daughter, too, recalls his preference for working alone: ‘I remember hearing the sound of the brush on the canvas when I was at home and he was painting. It was very aggressive. And then there would be long silence of looking,’ she describes.

Luers believes it was this attention to detail and the unwavering commitment to his work, which at times erred on anguish, that makes Diebenkorn ‘one of the greatest painters of the American experience’: ‘He spent a great deal of time getting the colours and composition just right. This wasn’t easy for him.’

Painted just months after his visit to the Soviet Union, Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad was a turning point for Diebenkorn. In this monumental work, measuring 71 ⅜ x 83 ⅛ inches, bold geometric planes of jewel-like colour have replaced the dynamic brushwork seen in his paintings Sausalito, Albuquerque, Urbana and Berkeley from the 1950s, as well as the figures in his work from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Depth and perspective have been diminished, while strong vertical lines bisect the canvas, presenting a highly abstracted view of a landscape as seen through a window, a favoured motif of Matisse.

‘I’m struck by the difference between the design on the screen on the left side and the spaces of colour on the right,’ says Grant. ‘To me, this work appears to be the quintessential beginning of Ocean Park.’ Clear parallels exist between Matisse’s early-20th-century works, such as Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914) and View of Notre Dame (1914), whose strong framework of black lines against a brushy blue ground is echoed in the Ocean Park paintings. This aesthetic connection not only results from the light that Diebenkorn sought upon moving to Los Angeles, but also his encounter with Matisse in Leningrad. Beginning in 1968 and continuing for 18 years, Diebenkorn produced no fewer than 145 paintings in this influential series.

The highly decorative floral curlicues that populate the upper left quadrant of Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad can also be read as a reference to Matisse’s Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1908), which he saw at the Hermitage. This is one of the French artist’s most radical paintings, and, like the present work, it is striking for its treatment of interior and exterior space.

‘With both artists, there’s a sense of the past in the present. The lack of covering up a line that they’ve discarded and this sense that the process is really important,’ says Diebenkorn Grant, adding that her father’s palette and Matisse’s were ‘very compatible.’

That being said, Diebenkorn Grant remembers her father’s singular approach to colour, or rather its unlimited permutations: ‘He didn’t like to talk about his work very much, but one of the things he talked to me about most was colour and how there were so many colours when we were tempted to just say, “That’s blue.”…My father changed my life, the way I see and want to see.’ Indeed, his masterful canvases, including Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, have inspired generations of artists and viewers to look at art differently and deeply.