Biography

Serge Poliakoff was born at the beginning of 1900 in Moscow. He is the thirteenth born of a sibling of fourteen children. His father supplied horses for the Russian army and owned a racing stable. In 1914, he began to take drawing classes, and shared his childhood among the religious icons he saw in the churches with his mother and the animation of the cultural life and literary salons of the Russian aristocracy. In 1918, he began his exodus across Europe where he accompanied his aunt, a famous singer, on…

Serge Poliakoff was born at the beginning of 1900 in Moscow. He is the thirteenth born of a sibling of fourteen children. His father supplied horses for the Russian army and owned a racing stable.
In 1914, he began to take drawing classes, and shared his childhood among the religious icons he saw in the churches with his mother and the animation of the cultural life and literary salons of the Russian aristocracy.
In 1918, he began his exodus across Europe where he accompanied his aunt, a famous singer, on guitar to earn a living. He finally arrived in Paris in 1923 and began his long training which lasted twenty years.
In 1937, he moved closer to the Delaunays, whose theoretical remarks helped him greatly to evolve. Two years later he exhibited his first abstract canvas in Paris, and was noticed by Kandinsky, who said: «For the future I bet on Poliakoff». He then took part in several exhibitions and, in 1945, he organized his first exhibition of abstract paintings. He then won the Kandinsky Prize in 1947.
At the same time, to meet his needs, Poliakoff made successful fabric drawings, but stopped this activity for fear that his painter’s work would suffer, and preferred to play the guitar in the Russian nightclubs.
He was then exhibited several times at the Galerie Denise René, then from 1951 at the Galerie Dina Vierny, after their chance encounter in a Russian cabaret where Dina Vierny replaced a sick singer.
The artist was finally able to enjoy his success in the 1950s and 1960s with numerous exhibitions and awards, as well as his participation in the 1962 Venice Biennale. He died in 1969, just before his big retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
Poliakoff is considered a great abstract master of the Paris School. Deeply marked by Russian icons, he tries in his painting to transcribe the same emotion. This iconic aspect is reflected in his admiration for Malevich’s Carré blanc sur fond blanc, which had a capital impact on his work.
Poliakoff seeks to express the presence of an existence in his work, he is looking for a prefigurative spiritual primitivism, like the American artists of his generation (Rothko, Gottlieb, Newmann). And this is expressed in the balance of forms that takes place in his compositions, and whose whole soul is based on the vibration and the colored intensity that emanates from it. Serge Poliakoff did not seek novelty in his painting, but eternity, making his paintings true divine images, icons of modern art.

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