serge poliakoff retrospective in Munich

conservatism in abstraction

II. Difficult to say,whether Poliakoff had earned his living by his art. Success began, when the german documenta II offered his art works in the context of the abstraction-création group to a wider public. In the beginning of the sxties he became french citizen and with that got an own room for his works in the french pavillon at the Biennale in Venedig. Before, he had, fitting to his education to "Liebhaberei" (art for amusement but not business) studied painting and other techniques at art schools for fifteen years. He knew and liked Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Wassilij Kandinsky and Otto Freundlich.

I. Peter Ade, the first director of the Hypo Kulturstiftung Artmanagement, left a great idea as his heritage for the museum. He wanted Serge Poliakoff to be shown in Munich.

The russian artist had been born in 1900 and came to Paris when the red armee succeeded in Russia. Educated in a rich land owner family, his mother a musician, he spend his youth in russia butleft some years later to thefrench capital; at first as a musician. In Paris, he etablished himself well and indifferent against the changing political circumstances in the context of the group "abstraction - création, even if not belonging to its main members.

III. His early art works, for example the small, quite too pretty gouache "Dance of russian gipsies" shows his receptive view of Kandinsky's and Münter's glass-paintings, and like them, russian folk art traditions. Not before the fifties, when the brand name "Abstraction" was forced by the USA within the Cold War, Serge Poliakoff took the concept of complete abstraction seriously into his art. The basical principles of these abstract art works and paintings are clearly underlined in Munich's exhibition. No contour, but simple, big, non-geometrical colourfields, smooth brushstrokes, just sometimes visible, with a touch of impressionism very european.

IV. The exhibition makes obvious, that Poliakoff's idea of modernity is not a modernist one's. A lot of abstraction-création members, like the Delaunays, Baumeister, Hans and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Naum Gabo, Theo van Doesburg and Alexandra Povòrina thought of abstraction as something modern, and developed the concept a lot of centuries before the Cold War.

But well, some of the "Cold War Abstraction"- artist came to the USA from europe, fleeing the nazis. They continued and, in a way, cared for the new american abstraction in her infancy, taking with them a lot of different ideas about abstraction..

V. For example, Arshile Gorky was a member of abstraction-création.But he was a figurative, surrealistic painter. His abstraction cannot really be compared with the Delaunays, Baumeister or Arp.Such a psychoanalytical or "tiefenpsychologischer" approach was even far away of the concept Kandinsky developed. As such, Gorky shows that Poliakoff was not the only one that gives this interesting art group a liberal face: one part of them searched for modernity and the individual in a modern society, the other part did something concerning individuality in a way that took subjectivity and society apart from each other - wide limits, why not.

Between them, and a little bit apart, is Poliakoff as a conservative and silent center point. He calls for the beauty of nature in his abstract works, reminds of and shows his spectators especially this kind of beauty. But why? Well, as a conservative and academician. To have been judged as a modernist with the documenta II and III was in some way superficial, although not wrong, respecting that abstraction is not necessarily innovative or revolutionary. You just need Kantianism, a lawn and a painting as objective form to conclude to abstraction - just ask Clement Greenberg.

...well, it didn't surprise us to see Poliakoff in Munich, as such, but we liked itwouldn't complain about it.