Gouache (modern), 1962

Catalog : [Catalogue raisonné, volume V, p. 62. Archives 862101]

22.00 cm. x 30.00 cm. | 8.66 in. x 11.81 in. (paper)

19.00 cm. x 26.00 cm. | 7.48 in. x 10.24 in. (image)

34.00 cm. x 40.00 cm. | 13.39 in. x 15.75 in. (frame)

Gouache on paper. Framed work 34 x 40 cm
Certificate of authenticity established by Alexis Poliakoff

The life of Serge Poliakoff (1900-1969) is linked to the turbulent history of Russia in the early 20th century. Born in 1900 into a large, happy family, his young life was turned upside down when his father died in the First World War in 1917. He fled to Constantinople and then across Europe. To earn a living, he worked as a guitarist. In the early 20s, he arrived in Paris, where he made his home. He studied mechanics, then decided in 1929 to devote himself to painting, while continuing to play music, in order to support himself. He steadfastly pursued his pictorial research and succeeded in finding his own path.
Serge Poliakoff's music and painting are linked by a common thread: harmony, a notion that is both musical and pictorial, of harmony between the different parts of a whole. Serge Poliakoff did not invent abstraction, which was born when he was a child. But he took hold of this pictorial modernity like no one before him: in Poliakoff's paintings, there is a balance of shapes and colors, a geometric rigor without dryness.
This work from 1962 - twenty years after the artist's debut in abstraction - is a perfect illustration of his chromatic approach: blues and greens are transformed by superimposing each other, in a play of transparencies. The light, painterly material plays with colors usually reserved for landscape painting, and thus for the natural world to which the artist was sensitive.
Poliakoff loved working on paper. His gouaches on paper were the subject of a remarkable exhibition at the Musée Maillol in 2004.
This painting is emblematic of Poliakoff's art in the late '50s, the years of maturity. The strength of the composition - green shapes creating fragmented lines and surfaces - is matched by the strength of the colors. In a word, composition and colors were thought or felt at the same time, in a single impulse by the man who said he wanted to “reach the life of colors”.

Certificate of authenticity
Excellent condition
Handsigned by the artist in pencil

Ref : LCD4833