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PostWar & Contemporary
3429
SERGE POLIAKOFF(Moscow 1900 - 1969 Paris)
Composition abstraite. Probably 1966.
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower centre and lower left: Serge
Poliakoff.
93 x 73.5 cm.
We thank Alexis and Thaddée Poliakoff for
their scientific advice. The work is registe-
red in the Archives Serge Poliakoff, Paris,
under the number 966068. The work will
be included in the 5th volume of the cata-
logue raisonnée, which is currently being
prepared. Further with the certificate by
the Archives Serge Poliakoff.
Provenance:
- Auction Galerie Koller, 19 November
1978, lot 5331.
- Acquired from the above by the
present owner; since then privately ow-
ned Switzerland.
Serge Poliakoff was born in 1900 in
Moscow. He fled at the age of 18 from the
October Revolution in Russia and having
travelled through Kiev, Tiflis, Sofia, Belgra-
de, Vienna and Berlin, he arrived in 1923 in
Paris where he settled. As he had studied
music, he started playing guitar to earn
a living, but quickly turned to art and set
out to learn painting, first at the Acadé-
mie Frochot, then at the Académie de la
Grande Chaumière. In 1931, Poliakoff took
part, for the first time, in a group exhibition
at the Galerie Drouant; he then spent the
years from 1935 to 1937 in London where
he attended the Slade School of Art. The
innumerable international exhibitions at
which his impressive works were shown
give evidence of the great recognition he
gained as from the 1960s.
Poliakoff started with figurative painting,
but he progressively turned to Abstract Art
when he met Sonia and Robert Delauney
and Wassily Kandinsky. However, he was
above all influenced by Otto Freundlich,
with whom he had forged bonds of friend-
ship and whose colour compositions fasci-
nated him; it was during that period that he
developed his own unmistakable two-
dimensional colour works, the so-called
Poliakoff’s “colour chords (compositions)”.
From the outset, Poliakoff utterly dissocia-
ted in his works colour from any figurative,
respectively any representational, form;
his concern lay more in the dynamics as
well as in emotion.
Based on his music studies, he applied
two different composition principles in his
works, which can be compared to polypho-
ny (music in which several different tunes
are played or sung at the same time) and
homophony (accompaniment chords are
subordinate to the main voice) in music.
In the early 1950s in particular, Poliakoff
first produced monochrome works in
which he densely painted the colour fields
with different nuances of the same colour.
At the same time, he experimented with
the juxtaposition of many different adjoi-
ning colours.
The present work, dating back to the
mid-1960s, belongs to the works that
were reworked a second time by Poliakoff,
and this is the reason why they have been
signed twice. The vibrant yellow surface,
slightly off-centre, dominates the work
and emerges again and again in other
colour-fields. This illustrates clearly the
artist’s characteristic modus operandi: he
applies various layers of superimposed
colours, so that almost no clear colour-
fields appear, but as we watch the painting,
we progressively discover an increasing
number of different colours. This is how,
in spite of abstraction, Poliakoff achieves
a coherent composition. Red is another
dominant colour in this work which limits
the composition at the top right and can
be discerned diagonally across the picture.
The artist creates thus a diagonal that
governs the whole composition, on which
the other colour-fields are aligned. These
colour-fields, which are never completely
symmetrical, nor completely geometrical,
confer to the painting its strong dynamic.
CHF 180 000 / 280 000
(€ 166 670 / 259 260)