POLIAKOFF, SERGE

* 08.01.1900 Moskow, † 12.10.1969 Paris

Serge Poliakoff was born in 1900, the thirteenth of fourteen children. In 1914 he began his first drawing lessons, learned the guitar, and became fascinated with mathematics and algebra. In 1918 when the situation in Moscow became tense due to the Russian Revolution, Poliakoff's father decided to take his family to safety in the country. During the train journey, Serge Poliakoff ran away, with the intention of joining the White Army and ended up in Constantinople, where he stayed with his aunt, the singer Nastia Poliakoff, and accompanied her on the guitar. After two years of concert tours throughout Europe, in 1923 Poliakoff decided to settle in Paris. In 1929 he began studying art at the Académie Frochot in Paris and continued at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière as well as at the Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London. His art was initially figurative and academic until around 1935, when he returned to Paris and met Kandinsky, whose art had a decisive influence on him and pointed the way to abstraction. His close circle of friends at this time comprised Robert and Sonia Delaunay as well as Otto Freundlich.

Already during his lifetime, he established a strong presence on the international art market. His extensive oeuvre consists of more than 3500 paintings and gouaches, which were shown in the most important European and American museums as early as the 1950s and 1960s. Since his death in Paris in 1969, 11 retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to him.