In 1960, Mikhail Tal posed for the artist Leo Kokle, and a portrait of the famous chess player was created.

Leo Kolke also loved to play chess. Meeting Mikhail Tal during the process of creating the portrait provided a rare opportunity to spark interesting conversations about the passions of the chess world. There are several versions of when the drawing was created. The first is that it was created when Tal and Koblenz were going to the World Championship. The second is that they are returning from the championship as winners. In this drawing, Mikhail Tal's hand is erased, but clearly visible, raised in the air, decisively and victoriously indicating the direction: "Forward!" Mikhail Tal (1936 - 1992) was a Latvian chess player who represented the USSR in international competitions until 1991. The eighth world chess champion (1960 - 1961), six-time USSR champion, international grandmaster since 1957. Aleksandrs Koblencs (1916-1993) was a Latvian chess player, coach, journalist and author of chess literature, his books have been translated into many languages. He was a long-time (1956-1979) coach and second of the eighth world champion Mikhail Tal. According to Koblencs's recollections, he met Mikhail Tal in the late 1940s, when Koblencs visited Riga Secondary School No. 22 for a leadership event. The acquaintance soon developed into a long-term collaboration. Koblencs invested a lot of effort in unleashing Tal's combinational chess talent and helping him hone his positional chess understanding. From 1956, Koblencs was also Tal's official coach. After Tal's victory in the USSR Chess Championship in 1957, Koblencs became the Honored Chess Coach of the USSR. He was Tal's second in his winning match for the World Chess Championship title in 1960 and in the lost rematch against Mikhail Botvinnik in 1961. Tal's busy competition schedule was the reason that Koblenz himself participated in tournaments less and less often, and his results began to decline in the early 1950s. He became the second-place winner of the Latvian Chess Championship three times (1951, 1953, 1957), but in 1953 he won the Riga City Chess Championship. In 1961 in Palanga, he won 3rd place in the Baltic Republics Chess Championship (Ivo Neijs won). Koblenz's cooperation with Tal lasted until 1971. /Wikipedia/