André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy is considered one of the greatest abstract painters of the post-war period. The influential art critic Pierre Guénégan has described him as “one of the greatest of all abstract painters”.
Lanskoy was born in Moscow in 1902 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. After graduating, he served in the White Army during the Russian Civil War, but after being wounded in Constantinople, he went to Paris in 1921 where he began his artistic career. Initially, Lanskoy was mainly associated with other Russian painters such as Soutine, Bart and Térechkovitch, with whom he exhibited at Galerie La Licorne in 1923. His work made an immediate impression on the art public and critics, leading to an invitation to exhibit with Delaunay, Survage and Zadkine at the Galerie Carmine the following year. Further success followed when he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and attracted the attention of the major collector Wilhelm Uhde, who continued to acquire Lanskoy's entire artistic output over the next two years. Uhde also introduced Lanskoy to the Galerie Bing, 20 rue La Boétie, where he subsequently signed a two-year contract and held his first one-man show, with more museums buying his work.

Lansky's paintings from this early period consisted of bold figurative compositions but from 1937 he began to explore abstraction in his work. Striving to stop painting figuratively, he completed his first fully abstract works in 1940 and exhibited his first non-figurative works in 1944 at Galerie Jeanne Buche.