Lotto 3406* - A217 Postwar e contemporary art - giovedì, 25. giugno 2026, 15h00
SERGE POLIAKOFF
(Moscow 1900–1969 Paris)
Composition Polychrome. 1946.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated lower right: Serge Poliakoff 1946.
50 × 61 cm.
Provenance:
- Collection Jean Bauret, Paris.
- Collection France.
Exhibited:
- Paris 1970, Serge Poliakoff, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 22 September–16 November 1970, cat. no. 8 (verso with label).
Literature:
Serge Poliakoff is regarded as one of the major artists of lyrical abstraction within the Nouvelle École de Paris. Following his flight from Russia in 1917, he arrived in Paris in 1923 after several intermediate stops, initially working as a musician before devoting himself entirely to painting. His studies at the Slade School in London and his encounters with Wassily Kandinsky as well as Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay profoundly shaped his path towards abstraction. Poliakoff developed a distinctive visual language in which colour no longer functioned as a means of representation, but rather as an autonomous material and a space-defining element.
The painting ‘Composition Polychrome’ from 1946 marks a decisive phase in Poliakoff’s early oeuvre. A dense network of small-scale, predominantly angular colour segments unfolds across the canvas. The work displays a vivid polychromy, in which strong colours such as blue, orange and red contrast with shades of green as well as neutral black and white. The composition still bears a strong influence of Constructivism and late Cubism; the forms appear almost to interlock or press against one another. During this creative period, Poliakoff experimented intensively with the division of the pictorial surface, whereby the individual fields of colour are separated by clear lines, generating a vibrating, almost restless dynamism.
The painting ‘Composition Polychrome’ from 1946 marks a decisive phase in Poliakoff’s early oeuvre. A dense network of small-scale, predominantly angular colour segments unfolds across the canvas. The work displays a vivid polychromy, in which strong colours such as blue, orange and red contrast with shades of green as well as neutral black and white. The composition still bears a strong influence of Constructivism and late Cubism; the forms appear almost to interlock or press against one another. During this creative period, Poliakoff experimented intensively with the division of the pictorial surface, whereby the individual fields of colour are separated by clear lines, generating a vibrating, almost restless dynamism.
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