The young Serge is interested in art and sculpture, and enrolls in the
School of Arts in Moscow. Come the Revolution of 1917 he fled Russia to go to
Turkey, and after adventures through Europe he finally settled in Paris in
1923. He was also a guitarist and played cabarets, which remained his
professional job for several years of his painting career.
Once established in Paris, he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande
Chaumière and the Académie Forchot to progress his painting studies.
It was in 1935 that he met Marcelle Perreur Lloyd, a descendant of Sir
Thomas More of Irish and French origin, who became his wife. It was at her
insistence that he continued his studies in England, at the Slade School of
Art. During a visit to the British Museum he is struck by the colors of the
Egyptian sarcophagi. From then on, his art became less figurative and rather
dominated by blocks of color. He gained a reputation for abstraction and pure
color.
On returning to Paris he met the painters of the time, such as Sonia and
Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, and the sculptor Otto Freundlich. In
1937, his first personal exhibition took place, at the Galerie Zak, in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Zak also gave the first exhibition to Kandinsky,
who is a supporter of Serge: “For the future I bet on Poliakoff,” he says.
During the war, his works became darker and more abstract. After the war, he
had an exhibition of his abstract compositions at the Galerie de l'Esquisse,
which put him in the spotlight and he received good reviews in the press. Two
decades followed where Serge's reputation grew, and he met several of the big
names in art and cinema. A room reserved for his paintings at the Venice
Biennale in 1962, in which year he became a French citizen. Retrospective at
the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, and an exhibition at the Galerie Ex-Libris in
Brussels, and at Circle and Square in New York, and so on. Yves Saint Laurent
designs a ‘Poliakoff’ dress. It was about the Whitechapel retrospective that
Pierre Rouve (diplomat and communicator) said, “His art, flourishing in a
perpetual present, is also an art of boundless presence”.
What characterizes a work by Poliakoff are blocks of color, a strong
intensity as if the color were all that remained of a scene. He was influenced
by the icons of the Orthodox Church, which are not exactly portraits but
objects of meditation. The Russian Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was of the same
opinion; his art simplified to a black square. Poliakoff did not know
Malevich's work until the 1950s, so he had to walk the same path separately.
It is also possible to make comparisons with the art of the Catalan Joan
Miró (1893-1983) with its somewhat marine forms, reducing living beings to
stains of color. All other consideration flees and you find yourself faced with
pure light, the “boundless presence” as Rouve says. It is considered
'tachiste', a movement that includes such as Hans Hartung and Antoni Tàpies,
and can be seen as the European equivalent of American abstract expressionism.
Following a heart attack in 1965, his health weakened, and Serge Poliakoff
died on October 12, 1969, aged 69. The following year the Museum of Modern Art
in Paris devoted an exhibition to him, and more recently others took place in
Bergamo (1970), Oslo (1976), Milan (1983), Paris (2013), New York (2016 and
2021). In the 13th arrondissement of Paris there is the “Place
Serge-Poliakoff.”
The progressive art journal Hyperallergic
characterized Poliakoff’s current reputation as ‘for France, like a respected
old uncle who is sometimes visited; but for the United States, a forgotten
name' and suggests that it is because in the 1950s when Serge was approaching
the peak of his career, Paris was losing its crown as 'art capital' to New
York. Even so, Poliakoff's importance as the innovator of a color sense above
all else, the 'unequaled colorist' as Van Gogh foresaw, has already begun to be
rediscovered.
(translation of a piece written for a French course - originally published 05/02/22)
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