Composition

Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1906, the thirteenth of fourteen children. 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 afterward that he met Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Otto Freundlich. With these influences, Poliakoff quickly came to be considered as one of the most powerful painters of his generation