Literature: A. Poliakoff et G. Durozi, Catalogue raisonné et monographie de Serge Poliakoff, volume V, Paris, 2016, No. 66–278 (Archives: 967008), ill. p. 181. Provenance: Private collection, Denmark.

The School of Paris, or École de Paris, is a term often used loosely about the group of artists who gathered in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. It was a group that, in a Europe characterized by war and crisis, set a new and progressive agenda for modern art, and they chose Paris as their centre of operations. In the time around the First World War, artistic refugees settled on the burgeoning art scene in areas of the city such as Montmartre and Montparnasse. Here they became a kind of ‘Frenchmen from many countries’. Serge Poliakoff, who fled Russia in 1918 and ended up in Paris in 1923, is one of these artists, and one of the artists who is often mentioned in connection with the École de Paris. The meeting with Paris is love at first sight for the young Poliakoff, who settles in the city and through the 1920s and 1930s primarily makes a living as a guitarist in the Parisian cabarets. In the evening and at night he plays music, and during the day he paints and moves among the most innovative artists of the time. Poliakoff has his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1945 and becomes part of the group of artists around the Galerie Denise René in 1947. Slowly, he develops his own abstract style characterized by rough textures with many layers of colour that reinforce each other and create a complexity in the different surfaces. These surfaces are arranged in a system that manages to avoid referencing anything that can be found outside the painting, neither in nature nor in the world of geometry. The painting has neither depth nor any symbolism, and in this way, it is a completion of the idea of ​​pure lyrical abstraction, or Tachism, in painting. Serge Poliakoff was born in 1900, and “Composition Abstraite” from 1966 should, in the best sense of the word, be described as a mature work. The complex colour surfaces in dark toned blue, white and red colours are arranged in a tight rhythmic system that keeps itself in a balance that is both static but also slightly trembling. It is Poliakoff being the most ‘Poliakoff’ he can be. A complete realization of what he himself described as the ideal for his painting; that it had to appear as a plastic poem with subtle vibrations.