Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff (Moscow, 1900 - France, 1969) spent his youth in Moscow and left Russia in 1918. His admiration for Russian icons marked his work. He settled in Paris in 1929, where he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and studied at the Slade School of Art in London between 1935 and 1937. He painted his first abstract canvases in 1938 and committed himself fully to abstraction from 1945, with a geometric vocabulary of interlocking flat forms resting on the expressive power of colour. He was one of the figures of the second School of Paris, alongside Nicolas de Staël, Vieira da Silva, Alfred Manessier, Jean Bazaine and Hans Hartung.