Lot 109 D

André Lanskoy was among France's most important representatives of the Art Informel of the “Nouvelle École de Paris” and of lyrical abstraction.
Lanskoy was born in Moscow in 1902. In 1921, after various stops along the way, he arrived in Paris, where he would live and work until his death. While studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Lanskoy was primarily interested in the still life, interior and portrait paintings of Henri Matisse, Chaim Soutine and, not least, Amadeo Modigliani. Collectors like the “marchand-amateur” Wilhelm Uhde or the industrialist Roger Dutilleul discovered the young artist and provided him with patronage; his friendships with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Léopold Survage and Ossip Zadkine or, later, Nicolas de Staël cemented his significance within the Parisian art scene.
In its suggestively organic framework of form and colour, the present composition strikingly demonstrates the subtle tectonics of the surface that distinguished Lanskoy's abstract compositions from the 1940s onwards and which furnished the artist with the attention of an ever-larger audience - also on the international stage.