Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1900, the thirteenth of fourteen children. His father, a
Kyrgyz, supplied the army with horses that he bred himself and also owned a racing stable. His mother was heavily involved with the church, and its religious icons fascinated him. He enrolled at the
Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but fled Russia in 1918. He arrived in
Constantinople in 1920, living off the profits from his talent as a guitarist. He went on to pass through
Sofia,
Belgrade,
Vienna, and Berlin before settling in Paris in 1923, all the while continuing to play in Russian cabarets. In 1929 he enrolled at the
Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His paintings remained purely academic until he discovered, during his stay in London from 1935 to 1937, the abstract art and luminous colours of the Egyptian sarcophagi.It was a little afterwards that he met
Wassily Kandinsky,
Sonia and
Robert Delaunay, and
Otto Freundlich. Poliakoff held his first one-man Paris exhibition in 1945. With these influences, Poliakoff quickly came to be considered one of the most powerful painters of his generation. In 1947, he was trained by
Jean Deyrolle in
Gordes in the
Vaucluse region of France amongst peers such as
Gérard Schneider,
Émile Gilioli,
Victor Vasarely, and
Jean Dewasne. By the beginning of the 1950s, he was still staying at the Old Dovecote hotel near
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was also home to
Louis Nallard and
Maria Manton, and continuing to earn a reliable income by playing the
balalaika. A contract enabled him to quickly gain better financial stability. In 1962 a room was given over to his paintings by the
Venice Biennial, and Poliakoff became a French citizen in the same year. His works are now displayed in a large number of museums in Europe and New York. Poliakoff also worked with ceramics at the
Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. He influenced the paintings of
Arman. In 2006, works by Poliakoff were chosen by the
Musée du Luxembourg for their exhibition entitled 'L'Envolée lyrique(lit:'lyric Flight'), Paris 1945-1956', namely 'Composition en brun', 1947, Ny Carlsberg Glypothek, Copenhagen; 'Composition rouge avec trait', 1952, Cologne Museum; 'Composition IV', 1954) [catalogue : ]. In 2013, The
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris devoted a large-scale retrospective to the abstract painter which included 150 works from the period 1946–1969. Since 1970 there has been no significant exhibition of the work of Serge Poliakoff in what became his home city. ==Exhibitions==