the solitary review

(translation of a piece written for a French course)

Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow on January 8, 1900, the thirteenth child of a family of Kyrgyz origin. His father was a horse breeder and his mother was very involved in religion.

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.