works with Color field painting. During the early 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn was known as an abstract expressionist, and his gestural abstractions were close to the New York School in sensibility but firmly based in the San Francisco abstract expressionist sensibility; a place where Clyfford Still has a considerable influence on younger artists by virtue of his teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. By the mid-1950s, Richard Diebenkorn along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and several others formed the Bay Area Figurative School with a return to Figurative painting. During the period between the fall 1964 and the spring of 1965 Diebenkorn traveled throughout Europe, he was granted a cultural visa to visit and view Henri Matisse paintings in important Soviet museums. He traveled to the then Soviet Union to study Henri Matisse paintings in Russian museums that were rarely seen outside of Russia. When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965 his resulting works summed up all that he had learned from his more than a decade as a leading figurative painter. When in 1967 he returned to abstraction his works were parallel to movements like the color field movement and lyrical abstraction but he remained independent of both. During the late 1960s Larry Poons whose earlier Dot paintings were associated with Op Art began to produce looser and more free formed paintings that were referred to as his Lozenge Ellipse paintings of 1967–1968. Along with John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronald Davis, Ronnie Landfield, John Seery, Pat Lipsky, Dan Christensen and several other young painters a new movement that related to color field painting began to form; eventually called lyrical abstraction. The late 1960s saw painters turning to surface inflection, deep space depiction, and painterly touch and paint handling merging with the language of color. Among a new generation of abstract painters who emerged combining color field painting with expressionism, the older generation also began infusing new elements of complex space and surface into their works. By the 1970s Poons created thick-skinned, cracked and heavy paintings referred to as Elephant Skin paintings; while Christensen sprayed loops, colored webs of lines and calligraphy, across multi-colored fields of delicate grounds; Ronnie Landfield's stained band paintings are reflections of both Chinese landscape painting and the color field idiom, and John Seery's stained painting as exemplified by East, 1973, from the National Gallery of Australia. Poons, Christensen,