ANDRÉ LANSKOY

André Lanskoy was born in 1902 in Moscow. He studied in Saint Petersburg, then in kyiv. It was in 1921 that he arrived in Paris, passionate about painting, and joined the Grande-Chaumière, an academy which saw Tamara De Lempicka, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti etc. pass through.

He was quickly noticed by the German gallery owner and collector Wilhelm Uhde who gave him his first personal exhibition in 1925. André Lanskoy was then a figurative painter, in the Slavic lineage, with frozen interiors, marked by a very "flat" perspective.

It was from 1938 that his painting evolved towards abstraction. He began producing a series of gouaches (undoubtedly his favorite technique) where, little by little, he revised his conception of the division of space. His paintings are very geometric, made of large white lines which cut out his subjects, which are still figurative. Then he frees himself from representation, to decompose the forms, transforming the characters of yesteryear into an assembly of soft tasks.
His work is reminiscent of that of Nicolas de Staël, of whom he was a close friend, of Poliakoff or even of Soutine with whom he had established a solid friendship from his first years in Paris.

André Lanskoy, this great Russian painter of the Paris school, died in Paris in 1976. He is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.