Serge Poliakoff

On the occasion of Serge Poliakoff's solo exhibition 'Image Divine', Almine Rech Paris hosted a talk with Alexis Poliakoff and Dr. Dimitri Ozerkov, art historian and former curator of Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg.

For Poliakoff, creating a painting was a process of seeking harmony by combining forms and techniques. He wanted to “follow the Old Masters” and often went to the Louvre, where he took his son Alexis. Which paintings did they look at? Alexis remembers The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico and The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello. When studying Giotto’s Saint Francis of Assisi, Poliakoff was interested in the robes of the sleeping pope. All these artworks dealt with problems of the boundary separating the image from the background and the texture of the painted surface.

— Dr. Dimitri Ozerkov

Serge Poliakoff (Moscow, January 8, 1900 – October 12, 1969) was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the 'New' École de Paris (Tachisme).

Poliakoff's early life was marked by upheaval and displacement due to political unrest in Russia. He fled the country during the Russian Revolution and eventually settled in Paris in the 1920s.
Poliakoff was exposed to the avant-garde art movements of the time, particularly Cubism and Fauvism, which influenced his early work. Over time, he developed his unique style, moving towards pure abstraction. His paintings often featured bold, contrasting colors and abstract forms that conveyed a sense of rhythm and movement. Poliakoff's work was a fusion of his Russian heritage and the contemporary European art scene. With these influences, Poliakoff quickly came to be considered one of the most powerful painters of his generation.

His works are now displayed in a large number of museums abroad: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C., US), MoMA (New York, US), Tate (London, UK), The Art Institute of Chicago, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain), among others. In 2014, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, devoted a large-scale retrospective to the abstract painter which included 150 works from the period 1936–1969.