クリスティーズさんのインスタグラム動画 - (クリスティーズInstagram)「Richard Diebenkorn’s ‘Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad,’ the artist’s definitive masterpiece from 1965, celebrates his admiration for the work of Henri Matisse and represents a pivotal moment in the trajectory of the California-based artist’s career. In the Fall of 1964, Richard Diebenkorn and his wife Phyllis traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange program – it was their first trip outside of the country. It was there that Diebenkorn witnessed firsthand the dozens of Matisse paintings housed in the major institutions in Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly 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 and radical of the Matisse’s paintings, Red Room (Harmony in Red) from 1908, which Diebenkorn saw at the State Hermitage Museum. Returning home, Diebenkorn began to pursue an evolved artistic vocabulary of abstraction, embarking on a new phase that would challenge the existing hegemony of figuration in his work. Absent are the figures that he had introduced into his work in the late 1950s, replaced by bold geometric planes of jewel-like color. Depth and perspective are still present, but in a much-diminished form. Widely published and extensively exhibited, including at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s critically acclaimed Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition in 2016, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this sumptuous canvas becomes a painting about painting, and celebrates two of the 20th centuries most avant-garde artists. We are thrilled to offer ‘Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad’ as a top highlight of our 20th Century Evening Sale this Fall. Learn more about the work via our LinkinBio! 20th Century Evening Sale | New York