Original Serge Poliakoff Composition in Red, Blue and Green - 1975

Artist Serge Poliakoff Year 1975 Title Blue, Red, Orange and Green Printer Mourlot Frères, Paris Size 70 × 95 cm (27.75 × 37.25 in) Type Original vintage lithographic poster — posthumous edition Condition A — Goog condition, see pictures This is an original large-format lithographic poster printed by Mourlot Frères in 1975 after Serge Poliakoff's Blue, Red, Orange and Green — a posthumous edition produced six years after the artist's death in 1969, authorised by his estate and printed by the atelier that had been the natural home for the finest colour lithography in Paris for three decades. The composition is quintessential Poliakoff: interlocking planes of pure, resonant colour — blue, red, orange and green — held together by the silent tension that defines his entire body of work, as if each form were the only possible neighbour of the next. Serge Poliakoff (1900–1969), born in Moscow into a prosperous family of horse breeders, fled Russia in 1918 in the aftermath of the Revolution and arrived in Paris in 1923 — surviving initially as a guitarist in Russian cabarets while painting in every spare hour. Trained at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later at the Slade School in London, he encountered Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Malevitch — a constellation of encounters that pushed him irrevocably toward abstraction. By the mid-1950s he was recognised as one of the undisputed masters of the Nouvelle École de Paris and of abstraction lyrique — the French counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism, more intimate in scale, more concerned with the inner life of colour than with the physical gesture of the painter's body. Poliakoff's colour was unlike anyone else's. He ground his own pigments, spent seven years — by his son Alexis's account — searching for what he believed was the secret of their transparency. The result is a body of work in which colour does not sit on the surface but seems to radiate from within: forms that hold their light, that breathe, that generate their own space. He described his compositions as "plastic poems" — and the phrase is exactly right. There is no narrative, no symbol, no reference to the world outside: only the silent drama of colour meeting colour at the right angle, in the right proportion. This example is in good condition — grade A — and is presented unframed, ready for the wall it deserves. A large-format testament to one of the great colourists of the 20th century — Poliakoff's inner light, at the scale it commands.