Serge Poliakoff

French painter of Russian birth. He arrived in Paris in 1923 and attended several of the Académies Libres. He moved to London in 1935 and attended the Slade School of Fine Arts. His deep interest in painting techniques led him to examine Egyptian sarcophagi in the British Museum; their superimposition of colors, together with the example of Paul Cézanne and that of the Italian primitives in the Louvre, proved of great importance to him on his return to France. Among 20th-century painters he admired the purity and construction of space in the work of Juan Gris and the spirit of Paul Klee’s art.