Serge Poliakoff valuation
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.
What a work by Serge Poliakoff is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 8 January 1900, Moscow
- Died
- 12 October 1969, Paris
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Moscow, London and the Venice room
Poliakoff was the thirteenth of fourteen children; his father, of Kyrgyz origin, bred horses for the army. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, fled Russia in 1918 and passed through Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna and Berlin before settling in Paris in 1923. He enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1929, and his years in London from 1935 to 1937, with the colours of Egyptian sarcophagi, turned him towards abstraction.
The Venice Biennale gave him a room in 1962, and he also worked in ceramics at the Sèvres manufactory. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris gave him a retrospective of 150 works in 2013, the first significant exhibition of his work in Paris since 1970.
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