Serge Poliakoff
Played the guitar in Paris nightclubs for twenty years, and painted interlocking blocks of colour.
Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1900 into a large Kyrgyz-descended family, left Russia after the revolution, and earned his living for two decades as a guitarist in Paris and London nightclubs while painting. Kandinsky, Delaunay and Otto Freundlich set his direction in the late 1930s. The mature work is entirely consistent: irregular flat blocks of dense, matt colour locked together across the whole surface with no ground and no depth, in a small number of deep reds, blues, ochres and blacks. He took French citizenship in 1962 and died in 1969.
The 1950s and 1960s canvases lead the market, which is centred on Paris. Poliakoff mixed his own paint to a matt, absorbent, almost fresco-like finish, and this is the crux of condition: the surfaces cannot be cleaned, they mark permanently, and any varnish applied by a previous owner destroys the effect and is very difficult to reverse. Gouaches on paper are numerous and are the accessible part of the output. He also made lithographs in signed editions. The catalogue raisonne by Alexis Poliakoff is the reference.
If you own a work by Serge Poliakoff
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