Serge Poliakoff

ESSAY BY JOE F YFE

C HE IM & R E A D NE W YOR K

SERGE POLIAKOFF: REAL PRESENCES Jo e F yfe I used to see him sitting at the Deux Magots. He had a real air of authority. Poliakoff ’s paintings were unusual for France then. They were not developed for the sake of beauty, and they were not gestural, which was much of what French painting was at that time.

—Shirley Jaffe

A

paint in a cramped workspace. A capacious body of work poured from it.

Poliakoffs are unmistakable once you become familiar with them. His stylistic coherence at first obscures what is eventually discovered—that within each individual work there is voluptuousness, earthiness, nuance and extraordinary resolve.

Poliakoff dedicated himself to studying and experimenting with

painting for two full decades before he began to distinguish himself as an artist in the late 1940s. From then on work came forth steadily at a consistently high level for two more decades until his death in 1969. He made no notable figurative or image-based paintings. He once said that if you

retrospective survey of the paintings of the Russian-born Parisian

need to express something that does not exist then that is pure abstraction.

Serge Poliakoff is an artistic event of the best kind—it disrupts our

By 1955, Poliakoff was considered one of the leading Paris-based

sense of continuity even as it restores it. Poliakoff’s reputation is fixed

artists. He became famous, fashionable and rich. He bought a thoroughbred

firmly in art history. His coloristic, haptic paintings have been eclipsed in

racehorse and was at Deauville every year. He had a London tailor and

the past decades but there is fresh interest.1

bought a used Rolls-Royce. But as the American art critic Annette Michelson

noted, this is “mere historical fact. The quality of his achievement translates

I saw my first Poliakoff on the wall of the Paris gallery galerie-pixi

twenty years ago. His work is now on my own map of art history, set in

him . . . to the realms of necessity.”2

place, like one of his shapes. As I began to know it, it was hard to digest.

Perhaps it was alienation from seemingly accumulated “Old World”

who came a generation after Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Miró and Braque.

pictorial culture. A first encounter might evoke a feeling of déjà vu. The

Though Poliakoff exhibited in America throughout his career, and very

pictures occupy vaguely familiar territory. Still, there was an intuitive

widely in Europe, his contribution, as well as those of his European

suspicion that the established canon, as I knew it, had left him out. The

peers, Hans Hartung, Jean Fautrier, Pierre Tal-Coat and Nicolas de Staël

thought comes that the territory of abstraction is more labyrinthine

among others, has been overshadowed by the achievements of the first

than suspected.

generation of Abstract Expressionists. This hindrance can be blamed on

a cultural rivalry between the US and France that began in the forties

Poliakoff’s intuition of what constituted abstract painting ranged

Poliakoff was one of the “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris,” a group of artists

throughout the history of art, but he remained within the tradition

and continues today.

of European easel painting at a time when this was being challenged

elsewhere. Nonetheless, as attitudes revise, his achievement may speak to

Still, American expansionism, coming at a time when the US enjoyed an

the present. Poliakoff has never lost the admiration of many painters and

extraordinary growth in military and industrial power while the rest of

art historians and among those who don’t know the work his strangeness

the world was in ruins, can be linked to the cultural dominance achieved

provokes curiosity.

by the Abstract Expressionists. This generation of Americans influenced

And the works are unusually resonant. Their tightly knit, shaped

European artists when their work began arriving in Europe in the mid-

planes intimate depths. Poliakoff worked mixed pigments directly onto a

fifties. This includes Poliakoff. But there were specific limitations present

canvas or wood support. The surfaces of his paintings resemble variegated

in the outlook of European artists coming into their own after 1945.

beton brut, slightly gritty cement impregnated with colors.

Poliakoff was a kind man, quiet, distinctive, refined and secretive.

took place before the war, were faced with a situation different from

He was protective of his recipes for mixing paint. He kept it in jars and

the Americans. The recent fate of Paris was a historical catastrophe.

didn’t use a palette. He spoke a mixture of French and English and often

Occupation by Nazi fascists, the consequences of Vichy collaboration,

used eccentric pronunciations. This was thought to be mannered, meant

and echoes of the widespread destruction of modern, bourgeois culture

to undermine his undoubted sophistication.

throughout Europe affected everyone, not excluding the avant-garde.

Poliakoff had a job working in nightclubs as a musician. He quit when

Poliakoff’s moral mentor, the German abstract artist Otto Freundlich, was

success finally came. When he began living luxuriously he continued to

deported to a concentration camp from Paris and was killed there in 1943.

Poliakoff in his studio, Paris, 1951. Photo Willy Maywald.

Progress in art can never be satisfactorily wedded to world events.

Poliakoff and his contemporaries, all whose foundational work

In the aftermath of the war in Europe, a demand was perceived for

He is categorized historically as one of the painters practicing

an art that was self-generated: there was a new value system that prized

Tachism, Peinture Informelle or Abstraction Lyrique, all terms for

individualism. Everyone needed to start from the beginning. One way this

School of Paris abstract styles. “Tache” is French for “stain,” referring to

took place was in an art that deliberately disfigured the past. This value

the patches of color with which many of the “Tachist” artists’ canvases

system thought highly of the archaic. “Archaic” was one of the favorite

were composed. The word is onomatopoeic, like the sticky paint many

attributes of the period. It was the style that encapsulated a yearning for

of the artists favored. “Informelle” or “informel” comes from “informe”:

a radical new beginning after the horrors of the Holocaust and WWII. It

formless. Michel Tapié described Art Informel as a method of painting

was a visual symbol of the vague belief that man could return to a point of

without a preconceived idea about what was going to be painted. As often

knowing innocence. As late as 1957, this idea still clung to his generation,

happens, an art critic might misread the way an artist paints in order

such as when Alexander Lieberman, writing in Vogue, called Poliakoff’s

to make a point. Poliakoff usually began by sketching in forms that he

color, “a map of emotional states . . . a way of expressing the solitude of

would then go about adjusting and readjusting, ultimately arriving far

the individual.” 3

from the initial motif.

I recently had the opportunity to look at Serge Poliakoff ’s U-shaped, blue and white Composition Abstraite (1968) along with two earlier pieces, Bleu Rouge from 1951 and Composition Abstraite from 1962. The blue and white painting was assured and resolved. The two others, with their interlocking blue and red shapes are noisier and grittier. The paintings brought to mind the work of one of my favorite artists, the wonderfully idiosyncratic Forrest Bess. Like Poliakoff, Bess employed the U form and intertwined shapes in hermetic compositions that feel simultaneously geometric and organic. It’s interesting that Poliakoff and Bess were contemporaries. But their biographies could not be more different: Bess has a complicated mythology, was a solitary bait fisherman living in Texas with radical ideas about gender and the body, while Poliakoff was a bourgeois, Rolls-Royceowning family man. They both nevertheless tapped into something raw and visionary.

—N. Dash

Poliakoff used to say, “Always work as if it was the first day.”4 He

never aligned himself with any credo of art making, but there is certainly evidence of “archaic shadows,” to use the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s term, in the ambiguities of his roughly partitioned colors and distressed surfaces.

Clement Greenberg called this his “awkwardness.”5 The Byzantine is present in the important influence of the icon, the religious decoration that was found in every church and domestic interior in Russia. Poliakoff was also familiar with the conventions of representation and decoration in Russian peasant culture.

Tapié was a French art critic and artist and a tireless promoter of

abstraction. He felt that cubism and geometric abstraction were inadequate, too “humanist.” In Tapié’s book Un Art Autre, he advocates the lessons of Dada. He writes that painters should “express themselves differently than actually through form . . . they act with indifference to the conventional wisdom and act without form in a profound anarchy.”6 If there was an anarchic spirit in Poliakoff’s paintings, it came from his concentration on the temporal pluralism of painting’s structures, whether it was how he derived some of his shapes from how a portrait was surrounded in an icon or how color is layered in an artifact. Later generations of French artists interpreted Poliakoff’s paintings and others of this new school of Paris as having a surfeit of “humanism,” but Poliakoff’s way of painting was a template for the immediately succeeding generation, notably Arman, who painted like him for a while before moving on to his “Accumulations.”7

Poliakoff told Le Monde in 1967 that “a painting must have more soul

in it than intelligence.” 8 Like the later Braque, he was interested in painting as matière: the preoccupation of the painter with the ingredient that realized space upon canvas. This was the primary object of his investigation.

I think that the French art world remains suspicious of Poliakoff, De Staël and others of the School of Paris because of its “humanism.” Support/Surface and BMPT asserted themselves against these mysterious gestures of interiority and immanence of the author.

Structuralism and Marxism informed both them and the subsequent critics and this becomes the real division—that’s my feeling. The mood at the time, with the Vietnam War and so on, was against the seduction of the bourgeoisie; actions were seen as a result of hierarchy or at least social processes.

Poliakoff is curious with his cold geometry and warm gestures, between the notions of systems and subjectivity. But these areas, produced by gesture and touch, signified bourgeois individualism to the later groups. Both Support/Surface and BMPT saw painting as no longer an evocation but an action and vigorously interrogated these actions in the social space as social processes. Poliakoff seemed to seek a “felt” surface produced by minimal but unique gestures rather than through the mechanical means of production.

So what choice does this leave us between this interrogation, bourgeois subjectivity and cynicism now?

—Jérôme Boutterin

color bands, Bandes Colorées (1937) [plate 1], the colors predominantly

S

older Russian’s scientific and spiritual theories about abstraction. He had

erge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1900, the thirteenth, nextto-last child of a horse-breeder for the Imperial Army. He had a

comfortable, privileged upbringing but soon found himself, with many other Russians, a participant in a diaspora after the revolution, fleeing to the West in 1917.

He survived by playing traditional Russian folksongs in various

nightclubs, first in Constantinople, accompanying an aunt and uncle, then in Berlin before settling in Paris in 1923. Into his middle age, he earned his living as a balalaika-playing guitarist, up until 1954. Eventually he married and became a family man, but continued to come home in his tuxedo from his job in one of the cabarets at three or four in the morning, take a nap, then go into his studio to work.

Poliakoff’s art education was largely traditional but unusually

interested in painting technique. Looking at his early work via the first volume of the catalogue raisonné 9 his lightness of touch stands out. In the early conventional figure studies, landscapes and portraits—whatever he brought his attention to there is intelligence and assuredness but otherwise no clue as to what lies ahead. Choices of subject matter seem arbitrary, and there is much experimentation with combinations of materials. Poliakoff seems to have largely went about studying painting the way one might learn to play an instrument—finding out what it can do before composing for it.

He was enrolled in various Parisian academies of art beginning in

1929, none of them, notably, were the least “experimental.” He moved to London in 1935 for two years. He studied at the Slade and frequented exhibitions and museums. Here Poliakoff was first exposed to abstract painting and performed some early experiments that most clearly appear as harbingers for the future: firstly, by executing a gouache of nine

warmer (two oranges, reds and yellows to one violet, green and blue) and mixed. He diluted some bands more than others but there is already the porousness of light that became so prominent later.

The second experiment took place one day at the British Museum

where he surreptitiously sliced off some small samples of paint from Egyptian sarcophagi with a pocketknife. He wanted to examine how the luminous color was layered. This lesson from antiquity was the origin of the method that became the backbone of his mature work: achieving nuance via transparency. Soon after he abandoned his tubes of commercial oil paints and mixed his own pigments for the rest of his life.

After he returned to Paris, Poliakoff developed a mentor-protégé

relationship with Wassily Kandinsky. He was put off before long by the better luck with Robert Delaunay, who held a salon on Friday evenings, inviting young artists to whom Delaunay gave color and composition assignments. Thirty artists would return the following week with exercises such as colored circles within circles, or three squares, each with an assigned color. Poliakoff found that, despite their objectivity, each artist’s contribution had its own individual character and sensitivity. In addition, Delaunay’s interest in constructing a picture as if one were looking through stained glass must have reconfirmed Poliakoff’s own ideas about transparency.

In 1937 there are numerous gouache paintings, many on dark

grounds, of mythological scenes or from peasant folktales. The following year he changed to landscape where a linear structure in crayon or ink grounds atmospheric patches of lightly applied watercolor. The cleavage of internal edges amid pictorial mass is addressed in various guises in minor genres.

Later that same year, a switch was made to boldly colored figuration,

again on a colored ground, that uses bright dabs of paint in order to unify the pictorial facture. From this year through the early forties, more and more of Poliakoff’s work was successfully resolved as abstraction, but his figure studies and portraits continued.

I liked Poliakoff. I knew of him and his work when I was in Paris in the early sixties. His paintings were beautifully handled, delicate. Where other Paris artists of the period, such as Mathieu, separated from the plane, Poliakoff stayed on the plane.

—Brice Marden

During the war in occupied France it was dangerous to exhibit abstract

took place among the works of Poliakoff and his peers were more gradual

paintings. Official Nazi culture had deemed advanced art “degenerate.”

than the American Abstract Expressionists, owing to their continued

During this dark time, Poliakoff continued his investigation of abstract

interrogation of the internal scale of the easel picture as opposed to the

painting tucked away from view, masked by his staying enrolled as a

American’s establishing of a literal scale in painting derived from the

painting student who made impressionist landscapes.

Mexican muralists, Navajo sand painting and other diverse sources.

After the war, Poliakoff began showing work and received commissions

But Poliakoff’s influence can be detected on some American artists

designing fabric. Though profitable, he soon abandoned fabric design. Its

who spent their post-war years in Paris. Most notably Ellsworth Kelly,

emphasis on the decorative was precisely the element in his painting that

whose work appeared in at least one recorded group show in the early

he was attempting to free himself from.

1950s when Kelly lived in Paris. Poliakoff at that time articulated a finely

His first gallery association was with the gallerist Denise René. He

hewn form within the painted surface plane of his paintings to the point

mixed with Hans Hartung, Pierre Schneider and Victor Vasarely among

when they seem to become independent presences. This may be in the

others. As vanguard abstractionists banding together, they critiqued each

DNA that produced Kelly’s later hard-edged paintings, freestanding

other’s work and dined every Saturday. The gallery’s identity eventually

sculptures and shaped canvases that were partially derived from nature

progressed toward kinetic and sharp-edged geometric abstraction and

studies. How to fix an intensely colored dolmen-like shape on contrasting

Poliakoff departed, telling René, “The lion hunts alone.”

brightly colored painted fields was precisely what Poliakoff demonstrated

in his works of the early fifties.

Some works on paper from 1946–48 are unusual and prophetic of

later work. These abstract compositions are purely linear. Several or many

lines curve or angle across the plane, but as a result of swiping, the lines

time. Held’s heavily impastoed palette-knifed works of that period have a

smudge the whole page and evoke a shallow illusionism as in Composition

number of Poliakoff’s characteristics, notably the active acknowledgment

Abstraite (1946–48). This marks a moment where the surface has been

of underpainting in the resolved picture. More generally, the standoff

perceived as a single plane in its entirety. It indicates that Poliakoff

between geometric structure and painterly ground is a problem that

understood that, for his purposes, what constitutes a painting even at its

unites them through their entire careers.

most stripped-down still consistently maintained an illusionistic depth, or

two-dimensional thickness. From a few years hence until the end of his

painting, the distinctive tonal color, was in fact the result of his desire to

life, his paintings possess an equal emphasis of articulated surface along

negate his intensely colored ones, the result of a remark made in print. In the

with uniform pressure against the frontal plane.

journal Combat in 1946, the critic Charles Estienne remarked that “Poliakoff

Yes, he was an interesting artist, and worth showing— the best of them of that time. But that European sense of surface was different from what the Americans were interested in. There was less a sense of expression and more what you can do with paint—that thickness, like Riopelle. We were not interested in getting a beautiful surface and more getting something like Franz Kline, but showing [Poliakoff] is worthwhile.

—Jack Youngerman

does paintings . . . as pleasingly ornate as a Bukhara or Samarkand carpet

This is one of the areas where Poliakoff differs from his American

contemporaries. The Parisian orientation regarded the painting as a

tableau,10 a fully achieved painting. The French school, as I understand it, critically re-defines the painting against the painting’s history, identity and cultural function. 11 And the French school was more wedded to the problems posed by the European easel painting. The scale changes that

A second American artist would be Al Held, also in Paris at that

The source of what became one of the signature properties of Poliakoff’s

. . . examples of pictorial folklore.” As the catalog essay notes, “Poliakoff did not take well to this albeit well-meant remark . . . locking him into a particularism he had hoped to escape from.”12

Viewing Serge Poliakoff ’s retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2013, my reaction was unexpected. Poliakoff was emblematic of the post-war School of Paris that we tend to dismiss.

What I saw instead were works that defied notions of authority through the involvement of the ornamental, the irrational and the sensuous. Producing a startling range of works based on variation, repetition and (dis)similarity, the works exhibited an interplay of contradictory characteristics through form, space and color.

To think abstractly is an oxymoron since we need language to think, but abstract paintings attempt to not only suppress language, but also function where language and sensation intercede. Poliakoff ’s paintings are models of this interaction. They defy the necessity to be interpreted within the overarching scope of the sign system, but allow the viewer to intuit and re-order how we engage visually. Above all, they allow us to enter into a non-lingual experience that nevertheless shows us something about the world and ourselves.

—Shirley Kaneda

The generality of emphasis that followed afterward can be seen as the

result of a negation in order that he address the painting per se; “Painting is the only problem,”13 he said. In this way he was a meta-painter, evoking the painting as a presence regarding itself. As Gérard Durazoi said, “[His

The Nouvelle Ecole de Paris characterized pictorial structure as

manifested through the facture of paint, among other things, and this partly explains the dominance of impasto, or in some cases such as Hartung, the scraping into a prepared and still wet painting ground.

Poliakoff’s scrapings, in his application of paint with a palette knife, are one indication of his awareness of a dialogue with the tableau in its many guises, particularly its origins on a cave wall or a frescoed wall, where the palette knife unites the fresco’s two tools of application, the trowel and the paintbrush.

Gris Noir Jaune from 1957 is echt Poliakoff. It’s an excellent example

of how wily a painter he can be within his chosen parameters. The range of grays varies within a lighter group on the left side of the picture and collects in a darker range on the right. The very darkest seven-sided key shape is in the center, where it locks in an embrace kiss-style with the only yellow in the painting, which appears to have been painted on later and at once.

paintings create] a mystique how forms reveal themselves in everyday

life. [They] are a spiritual meditation on the meaning of presence . . . the

8] a fiery vertical panel divided up the middle by a jagged edge. Its intensely

presence of the work and the presence of the viewer.”14

layered reds on the left side and bursting knife strokes of bright yellows and

The painting Bleu Rouge from 1951 [plate 3] is the earliest painting in

reds on the right that radiate out from the center is poised stylistically in

the exhibition. Here his work has begun to mature, having purged earlier

territories occupied by Van Gogh, Clifford Still and contains pre-echoes of

exoticisms. Bleu Rouge has elements that anticipate later paintings, like his

Mark Grotjahn. With its texture of lacquered red and blindingly luminous

single-form works of the 1960s. The field of red flips optically between

yellow that is like the gold in a religious picture it is like a transcription of what

foreground and background in relation to the two blue forms that attach

looking at an icon, in certain circumstances, must feel like.

themselves to opposing edges of the painting. The workmanlike, laborious

I am struck by the sensuousness of the color relationships—how the paintings glow. They seem to be about an experience of absorbing radiance. There is a gentleness in the pictorial tensions that at first feels undramatic. Only after sustained looking do they become fraught and complicated.

—Patricia Treib

brushstrokes decompound the intensity of the two colors. Eleven years later, he reprises a similar motif in Composition Abstraite [plate 14] where the final colors of red and blue are brushed over a thickly palette-knifed surface that has been laid down like wet plaster. It’s a reminder of how works of art always concern themselves with uniting opposites of some kind, here the wetness and dryness of applications seem to draw out and play off one another.

In Composition en Bleue au Cercle II [plate 7] from 1955 the blues seem the same, but looking closely, aren’t. Most likely they come from different jars with different mixes of blue. Scraped applications of paint flow outward from the center of the picture toward the perimeters.

Though each internal division of the painting occupies a particular tone, there is a dark to light gradation from left to right that seems to underpin the painting, independent of the visible forms, as if the support was tinted beforehand. The one rounded form on the lower right contrasts with the dominance of the overall angular construction, but its presence is echoed throughout the picture in the curving strokes of the knife marks that surround it, scraping light back through and revealing the ground.

Interestingly, that same year also brought forth Composition Abstraite, [plate

Poliakoff often worked on a composition in a series, changing colors,

varying the internal combinations of interlocking planes, often trying a horizontal orientation vertically. This was the case with Gris Noir Jaune but all the adjacent variations before and after this painting were more colored. One of this painting’s subtleties, which are only revealed after some scrutiny, is that the shape in the lower right corner is made of a gray that appears of an entirely different palette, and its shape is a bit rounder than every other piece of the puzzle. It also has a more granular texture, seeming to force itself onto the frontal plane more than the rest of this relatively atmospheric softly painted picture.

Around the time that Jasper Johns painted White Flag (1955),

different moments, over a period of weeks or months. They collide on the

White Target (1957) and White Numbers (1958), Poliakoff painted Blanc

plane like the mismatched squares of linoleum on a floor might. For all

Monochrome (1958) [plate 10] with its rich rubbed and scraped surfaces

of the refinement of his shard-like forms, one comes away understanding

and slow changes of off-white warmth, grittiness and incised geometries,

that the divisions between the attached patches are buttressed by

which points up the conversation that always takes place between the eye

the continuity of the painting, in the patterns of paint scrapings and

and the hand in his work. Poliakoff seemed to understand the picture

brushstrokes. With the stabbing light that the furrows of paint seem to

as something that is handled, that appeals to the sense of touch to the

force out from a center axis, there is a kind of visionary feeling akin to El

point where it has a corresponding corporeal presence. Poliakoff said that

Greco’s electrically charged fractures of space.

“people in Russia pray to individual icons and kiss them. They couldn’t

Poliakoff was using cubist space as a foundation, but managed to hammer it flat and then move shapes forward and backward within the picture plane, based on the use of color. His work anticipates color field, but also artists such as Tom Nozkowski and myself, although we are on the other side of the same problem. We were trying to re-activate flat space after minimalism, reaching for depth, whereas he was flattening cubist space. Poliakoff ’s space is not contemporary, but I find myself very sympathetic to it.

—Jonathan Lasker

kiss them if the matière of the icon had not the organic quality of real painting . . . the picture should bespeak the love of God, even if you don’t believe in God . . . if you want to get the big music in.”15

This is perhaps what remained of his time with Kandinsky, an ability

to frame the energy of the sacral while addressing the physical, or viceversa. As the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain writes: “The icon is immediate, as is the gaze, and it mediates, as does the gaze of whatever it renders present . . . to the point where it is integrated as a profane object, but imbued as well with sacredness.”16

The connection between the Russian icon and modernist painting

dates back to the Russian Suprematists whom Poliakoff only discovered in 1952. He said of Malevich, “That particular meeting only brought me confirmation.”17 Called faktura by the Russian constructivists, the texture of the pictorial surface had expressive power and “the focus is oriented towards ‘real’ materials rather than towards the material as a medium of illusion.” 18

The “real” in Poliakoff is divided up between the presence of artistic

influences and his learned methodology of building up the skin of the painting with many layers of sometimes contrasting color. Rather than an illusionism that imitates nature, Poliakoff’s concern in his interrogation of the painting was with mechanics of illusionism in objects that were painted. In his eureka moment in the British Museum, he discovered the life of the painting exists in a state of quasi-independence from the image.

This encounter with the shifting transparent underpinnings of painted representations did not mark a period of closure but in fact was only the beginning of a dialogue with a vast range of art that lasted for the rest of his life. Poliakoff traveled to see art and often went great distances to look at a particular painting. For example, he went to Toledo to see El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz, then left without looking at anything else.19

Rose et Lie de Vin [plate 11] is also from 1958. It’s covered in a buttery

rose and cream substance that has been pushed around. Again there is more than one mixture of the dominant rose tint in operation. There are internal dissonances of textures, a result of troweling a shape into place at

Often, when one of Poliakoff’s paintings can be seen in a museum,

where paintings by others are nearby, they deconstruct them. Once, after looking at a Poliakoff, I went and looked at a Bonnard. The memory of the rhythmic surface strokes of the Poliakoff and how these marks become independent of the limned forms brought a new vision to the Bonnard: the pattern of the brushstrokes appeared completely distinguished from the boundaries of the objects depicted in a way I had never seen in a Bonnard before.

“Painting,” Poliakoff once said, “is a tête-à-tête.” In “Real Presences,”

the title of a book-length essay from 1989 by the cultural critic and philosopher George Steiner, an argument is made for the primacy of works of art being the foremost and only meaningful critique of other, older works of art. “All serious art, music and literature is a critical act.” 20 He proposes a Utopia where all “secondary” commentary, as he calls it, all journalistic and theoretical “parasitism”21 is banished. At the beginning of the book, Steiner declares, “The readings, the interpretations and critical judgments of art, literature and music from within art, literature and music are of a penetrative authority rarely equaled by those offered from outside by the non-creator . . . the reviewer, the critic, the academic.”

For example, Steiner writes that “Virgil guides our reading of Homer

as no external critic can . . . The presence, visibly solicited or exorcized, of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in the epic satire

of Pope and in the pilgrimage upstream of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, is a

that accompanies the Russian Orthodox liturgy, where multiple singers

‘real presence,’ a critique in action. Successively, each poet sets into the

singing the bass chant freely improvise around a core chant. Poliakoff

urgent light of his own purposes, of his own linguistic and compositional

was 64 when he made this painting, the time of life when memories of

resources, the formal and substantive achievement of his predecessor(s).” 22

childhood begin to arrive unexpectedly. The whole holy Eastern Orthodox

For the catalog essay accompanying Poliakoff’s retrospective

Russianness—the icons, the smell of incense, the deep hum of the bass

exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, John Russell refers to his

baritones all seem to be evoked here. But this thumbnail psychoanalysis is

most recent work as occupying a “mysterious middle-ground.” But where

not meant to mark him as a “Spiritual” painter, quite the contrary, more

Russell was writing about works such as Gris (1962), where the patterning

to suggest that his instrument, as it were, was supple enough to conduct

of markings begins to overwhelm the internal linear divisions, from the

memory, criticism, quotation and metamorphosis as it suited him. The

present perspective Poliakoff’s entire oeuvre dwells in a mysterious middle

spiritual in Poliakoff lies in his great spirit of inquiry.

ground, immersed in both a factual awareness of all the properties of

I think Serge Poliakoff ’s paintings seem like evidence of a very extended practice of painting as construction; to me their resemblance to a puzzle is an essential cipher for their power as paintings/things. The paintings feel like puzzles wherein the pieces are being cut at exactly the same time as they are being assembled. They seem to be figuring themselves out as you look at them/in front of your eyes and perhaps not getting there all of the time.

In this regard I think it’s really important that these paintings are seen in person; in reproduction they resolve into something much more familiar, graphic and flat, with somewhat repellent (to me) colors and uncomfortable/ungainly compositions, but in person they appear really tough and maybe even more uncomfortable but in a less mannered way, more antagonistic. It’s this scruffy ugliness, and lack of finesse that differentiates them from other paintings of the time (and now as well).

They really bear witness to a repeated effort and real struggle (this idea of visible struggle or “work” feels important to me in these paintings) to solve a problem (i.e., make a painting, think a thought, etc.) as kind of a network, repeatedly poking, probing the same shapes and formats through different colors and values, positions and hierarchies. I really like thinking about this too, in relation to his large output and extended life/time frame of painting.

—Matt Connors

20th-century European easel painting and its major progenitors—there are moments when one finds oneself in the presence of fleeting memories of Picasso, Braque, Klee, etc.—to his ability to evoke the appearance of aspects of ancient and near-ancient pictures from Lascaux to Romanesque frescoes to Cimabue.

In other words, Poliakoff appears a prime example of a generator of

Steiner’s “real presences.” Artistic predecessors seem to haunt Poliakoff’s paintings, living on through his work and his interpretive abilities. But Poliakoff is the most imperturbable of “profound” painters. This illdefined quality about him is what ultimately seems to make him available to contemporary art, that he wears his seriousness lightly, as if profundity is there by default. The continuous production of his final twenty years indicates, rather than devotion, a fascination with the play of painting's’ signifiers that he finds he has become capable of manipulating.

The “Real Presences” passage is reproduced in order to underline

what seems to be an essential key to Poliakoff, fixing him both as an important modern painter we can locate firmly in a known past and as a wild card who may well speak to the present despite (or maybe because of) his current anachronistic status. The term “Real Presences” corresponds to the idea of an enacted metaphor that apparently Steiner derived from the act of transubstantiation in the Catholic Church. 23 Orange Jaune et Vert from 1964 might be interpreted as a metaphor for, or a reenactment of, Poliakoff’s childhood experiences in Russian churches, where he was taken every day. This is one of his later works where though the paint remains thick, in the way that one sees different colors through its layers, it is less physically dense, owing partially to the larger format and partially to the influence of American abstraction that encouraged broadness over density.

The painting, another that shares El Greco’s strange smears of light,

but in Poliakoff’s distinctive colors, has dark maroons and eggplants scraped over red and orange that operate as do the Byzantine choral music

The later works, where often a single form of one or two colors

occupies a contrasting ground, have been described as a departure from

the strongest of his works, but these totemic, polyvalent abstract figures are simply a result of his continuing to condense his forms; they also reveal, more nakedly, his inherent inventiveness.

Poliakoff observed that with Impressionism colors had to be

discovered to paint land and air.24 Composition Abstraite (1968) [plate 17] with its medium-toned ultramarine quietly occupying the light cream surface in a wide band is one of the late works that takes on French modernism’s adoption of ancient Mediterranean light, like an entry into the make-the-best-blue-and-white-modernist-painting contest that would include key works by Matisse and Picasso. Poliakoff’s substitution of heavy textured jute for his rough painted surface and the bulky classicism of the thick ribbon of form suggest a bodily intimacy. With its purposeful playfulness, the painting is a cross between a picture and an espadrille.

In Composition abstraite from 1969, one of the late broken-up-shield works, Poliakoff reveals his debts to the Italian primitives. The hairiness of the roughly woven jute is discernably general amid the thinly painted surface.

Some of the airy transparency that had been achieved years earlier in his gouaches arrives here on a grander scale. No longer propositional but fully realized, there is an evenness of tone accompanying remnants of white ground, reds are brushed over yellows, several burgundy and peacolored patches appear mixed on the surface when wet.

The gouaches, with their brushed and re-brushed semi-transparent

surfaces that lay thickly stacked like large dried leaves on his painting table as he surrounded himself with half a dozen paintings in progress, seemed to anticipate this later work, where there is more aridity and even light. For late modern paintings, they feel more approachable than most; they address the eye but also the body, almost like garments.

Poliakoff can be considered a classicist, in seeking to work within a

known index of modernist form; a hermetic Proustian, evoking memories of a Russian boyhood; a late cubist; an antiquarian making curiously fossilized late modernist anomalies; or a painting technician—no interpretation is exclusive. But he can serve best at this time as a model for the re-investigation of painting’s complexities. In occupying the rear guard of the international avant-guard of painters, he brings to the present a ruminative intensity that accompanied what Brooks Adams called the courageous boiling down of his forms.25

Beyond this, his contribution, as that of a number of the New School

of Paris artists, is in his understanding of abstract space. If we consider the Abstract Expressionists, their achievement was based on a concentration of one painting trope, such as Pollock’s spatter or Rothko’s sfumato. As stated earlier, this literalized the painting space. The only exception was de Kooning, who utilized the translucent depth of oil paint as it provided a mimesis of human flesh and totalized into an abstractly painted universe.

The main principle of abstract painting is, to be short, one of the monochrome. From the suprematist Puni to Ad Reinhardt: radicalism as a way of being; deductive movement combining in an object—shapes and colors that condense into the indivisible unity of the concept.

Another contemporary of Poliakoff is Atlan but also Barnett Newman and his idea of the sublime and Pollock’s later paintings. For these painters the pictorial movement is inductive: they keep coming back to the original point where figuration and abstraction stand together, where the shape is not a discernible entity but a mass of energy and granular material.

Thus the large planes of color arrays in Poliakoff.

He mixes glittering dust grains into the white light church interiors of Dutch painting—the marked separations of these color planes are outcroppings of the sharp lines of Cézanne’s Mount Sainte Victoire.

Poliakoff anticipated and responds to Frank Stella’s concern: “If the major innovative goals of abstraction . . . were at the expense of the human figure, the game was not worth the candle.”

Abstraction is not decomposition or simplification or evolution but, on the contrary, something that works more deeply or if you prefer, something under the figure, something older. In this way we can understand what abstraction and figuration have in common and what is different: a difference of levels.

—Christian Bonnefoi

Poliakoff articulated a spatial depth for abstract painting that did

not rely on the figural, but on how depth and complexity was achieved through facture. We don’t look at a Poliakoff so much as through it, closer to how we look into a traditional painting. In this way, I don’t think that Poliakoff’s investigations are a closed issue; they give to the present glimmers of possibilities of what painted spatial depth might be.

In addition, his work affords a reference point in relation to subsequent

European abstraction in that he provided a secure, identifiable point of departure. Beyond this, his articulation of abstracted space is a necessary point of reference for models of abstraction that go beyond their relationship to the painting.

1

A retrospective was held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in

2012 and a major gallery exhibition appeared last year in London.

2

Annette Michelson, as quoted in Alexis Poliakoff and Gérard Durozoi, Serge

Poliakoff: Catalogue raisonné, Vol. III, 1959–1962 (Paris: Archives Serge Poliakoff, 2011), 27.

3

Alexander Lieberman, “An Imprint of Paris,” Vogue, April 1957, 195.

4

Serge Poliakoff: Portrait Intime du Peintre, directed by Elizabeth Lennard (Paris:

Musée Maillol, 2011), DVD. 5

Clement Greenberg, “Poetry of Vision,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 286.

6

Michel Tapié, Un Arte Autre: où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du reel (Paris:

1952), quoted in Art in Theory: 1900–2000, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 629–30.

7

Gwenaël Kerlidou, in conversation with author, Summer 2015.

8

As quoted in Gérard Durozoi, Serge Poliakoff: Monograph, Vol. 1 (Paris: Acatos,

2004), 165.

9

Alexis Poliakoff and Gérard Durozoi, Serge Poliakoff: Catalogue raisonné, Vol. I,

1922–1954.

10

For much of my understanding of the tableau I have to credit Mick Finch’s

ongoing Tableau Project and the various writings and conversations with Christian Bonnefoi.

11

http://hyperallergic.com/116772/poliakoff-and-the-russian-connection/

12

Alexis Poliakoff and Gérard Durozoi, Serge Poliakoff: Catalogue raisonné, Vol. I,

1922–1954, 152–53.

13

Serge Poliakoff: Portrait Intime du Peintre, directed by Elizabeth Lennard.

14

Ibid.

15

As quoted in John Russell, Serge Poliakoff Retrospective, exh. cat. (London:

Whitechapel Gallery, 1963), 14.

16

Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the

Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 138.

17

As quoted in Alexis Poliakoff and Gérard Durozoi, Serge Poliakoff: Catalogue

raisonné, Vol. I, 1922–1954, 225.

18

Maria Lind, introduction to Abstraction (Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary

Art) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 12.

19

Serge Poliakoff: Portrait Intime du Peintre, directed by Elizabeth Lennard.

20

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11.

21

Ibid., 49.

22

Ibid., 11, 12.

23

James Wood, “George Steiner’s Unreal Presence,” in The Broken Estate: Essays

on Literature and Belief (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 166–67.

24

Serge Poliakoff: Portrait Intime du Peintre, directed by Elizabeth Lennard.

25

Ibid.

1. Bandes ColorĂŠes 1937 gouache on paper 15 x 7 3/4 in 38 x 20 cm

2. Composition Abstraite c.1946–48 charcoal, chalk and gouache on paper 25 5/8 x 19 3/8 in 65 x 49 cm

3. Bleu Rouge 1951 oil on canvas 35 x 45 5/8 in 89 x 116 cm

4. Rouge, Jaune et Noir 1951 gouache on paper 23 1/4 x 17 3/8 in 59 x 44 cm

5. Composition Abstraite 1955 gouache on kraft paper 23 5/8 x 17 3/4 in 60 x 45 cm

6. Composition Jaune c.1955 gouache on paper 24 3/8 x 18 1/2 in 62 x 47 cm

7. Composition en Bleue au Cercle II 1955 oil on panel 38 1/8 x 51 1/8 in 97 x 130 cm

8. Composition Abstraite 1957 oil on panel 51 1/4 x 38 1/4 in 130 x 97 cm

9. Gris Noir Jaune 1957 oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in 65 x 81 cm

10. Blanc Monochrome 1958 oil on panel 38 1/8 x 51 1/8 in 97 x 130 cm

11. Rose et Lie de Vin 1958 oil on panel 51 1/8 x 38 1/8 in 130 x 97 cm

12. Noir et Gris 1959 oil on canvas 31 7/8 x 25 5/8 in 81 x 65 cm

13. Composition Abstraite 1961 gouache on paper 24 3/8 x 18 1/8 in 62 x 46 cm

14. Composition Abstraite 1962 oil on canvas 38 1/4 x 51 1/4 in 97 x 130 cm

15. Polyptyque (4 Panneaux) 1966 oil on canvas 102 3/8 x 32 1/4 in 260 x 82 cm

16. Composition Abstraite 1968 gouache on paper 24 3/4 x 18 3/4 in 63 x 47.5 cm

17. Composition Abstraite 1968 oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in 100 x 81 cm

18. Composition Abstraite 1968 tempera on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 in 162 x 130 cm

19. Composition Abstraite 1968 oil on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 in 162 x 130 cm

20. Composition Abstraite 1969 gouache on paper 24 x 18 1/8 in 61 x 46 cm

21. Composition Abstraite 1969 oil on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 in 162 x 130 cm

A

product of the Russian diaspora that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Serge Poliakoff (1900–1969) fled to the West, educating himself in the art schools and museums of

London and Paris. He painted every day while raising a family, supporting this life by playing Russian folk songs on guitar in Parisian nightclubs late into the night. This hectic existence lasted well into his forties, when twenty years of foundational pictorial research finally came to fruition in a distinctive synthesis of painterly sensuality and ideational planarity.

Professional recognition increased his productivity and ambition, resulting in a further twenty years (the remainder of his life) of paintings, gouaches, prints and related decorative projects that many consider the high-water mark of the “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris.”

Poliakoff ’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Kunstmuseum Bern , Switzerland; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Gallery, London. In 2013, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris hosted the major retrospective, “Le Rêve des Formes.” The 2016 exhibition at Cheim & Read marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States in thirty-five years.

Poliakoff in his studio on the rue de Seine, Paris, 1968. Photo Alexis Poliakoff.

Cover: Poliakoff outside Erker-Presse, Saint-Gallen, 1967.

We are very grateful for the efforts of Alexis Poliakoff, Marie Victoire Poliakoff and ThaddĂŠe Poliakoff.

PUBLISHED ON THE OCCASION OF THE 2016 CHEIM & READ EXHIBITION. DESIGN JOHN CHEIM. ESSAY JOE FYFE. EDITOR ELLEN ROBINSON. PRINTER GHP MEDIA. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, ADAGP, Paris. ISBN 978–1–944316–02–0.

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