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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming 2nd volume of the Serge Poliakoff catalogue raisonné being prepared by Alexis Poliakoff, Paris.
Standing in front of the painted Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum in 1935, Serge Poliakoff became entranced by their flat areas of superimposed colours. The cultural sources of his work came to include both ancient and modern models, but this aesthetic encounter was to prove decisive for his oeuvre. Similarly captivated by Byzantine icons, he found an archetype for achieving balance between verticals and horizontals, and for maintaining equilibrium between the centre and edges of the image. Hours spent in Moscow churches with his mother as a child no doubt instilled a deep appreciation for the quiet solemnity of Russian religious images.
Poliakoff's pictorial language was of course equally informed by several key contemporaneous practitioners and theorists of modern art. He admired greatly the whimsical, yet methodical, construction of space in Juan Gris' and Paul Klee's work, and Paul Cezanne was his precursor for overall compositional structure. But it was in the colour theories of Robert Delaunay, and curved colour-form constructions of the sculptor Otto Freundlich, that he discovered his most instructive examples. Delaunay was fascinated by how the relationship between colours could create sensations of spatial depth. Poliakoff took this further to examine the power of colour in compositional construction.
The current work represents Poliakoff's mature style. Although shades of brown and grey were his preferred tonalities during the 1940s, after the 1950s he extended his palette to include bright contrasting tones. So fascinated by the material properties of pigment was he, that he abandoned commercially produced paints to mix his own.
It is in the interior of colour - the layering of hues - that Poliakoff finds his voice. The qualities of his work - self-contained and reflective, guided by an interior modulation - all emanate from his chromatic mastery. Although fields of colour are juxtaposed, no distinction is made between colour, form and space. Taking his cue from Byzantine art as much as modern masters, Poliakoff effaces the image to the flatness of the picture plane. All elements of design and composition are articulated by the surface. Colours lead to other colours, which they enliven and entrap. Forms are simplified and monumental, secure in a restful solitude. His plastic vision represents one of the most sustained and distinctive contributions to the post war Ecole de Paris.
Standing in front of the painted Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum in 1935, Serge Poliakoff became entranced by their flat areas of superimposed colours. The cultural sources of his work came to include both ancient and modern models, but this aesthetic encounter was to prove decisive for his oeuvre. Similarly captivated by Byzantine icons, he found an archetype for achieving balance between verticals and horizontals, and for maintaining equilibrium between the centre and edges of the image. Hours spent in Moscow churches with his mother as a child no doubt instilled a deep appreciation for the quiet solemnity of Russian religious images.
Poliakoff's pictorial language was of course equally informed by several key contemporaneous practitioners and theorists of modern art. He admired greatly the whimsical, yet methodical, construction of space in Juan Gris' and Paul Klee's work, and Paul Cezanne was his precursor for overall compositional structure. But it was in the colour theories of Robert Delaunay, and curved colour-form constructions of the sculptor Otto Freundlich, that he discovered his most instructive examples. Delaunay was fascinated by how the relationship between colours could create sensations of spatial depth. Poliakoff took this further to examine the power of colour in compositional construction.
The current work represents Poliakoff's mature style. Although shades of brown and grey were his preferred tonalities during the 1940s, after the 1950s he extended his palette to include bright contrasting tones. So fascinated by the material properties of pigment was he, that he abandoned commercially produced paints to mix his own.
It is in the interior of colour - the layering of hues - that Poliakoff finds his voice. The qualities of his work - self-contained and reflective, guided by an interior modulation - all emanate from his chromatic mastery. Although fields of colour are juxtaposed, no distinction is made between colour, form and space. Taking his cue from Byzantine art as much as modern masters, Poliakoff effaces the image to the flatness of the picture plane. All elements of design and composition are articulated by the surface. Colours lead to other colours, which they enliven and entrap. Forms are simplified and monumental, secure in a restful solitude. His plastic vision represents one of the most sustained and distinctive contributions to the post war Ecole de Paris.