At a time when post-war art was in search of new forms of expression, new styles, and new subjects, Serge Poliakoff gained widespread recognition for his compositions, which were still highly unconventional in European art at a time when figurative painting was unable to meet the demand for renewal and its forms and artistic potential seemed exhausted, with the result that artists embarked on an introspective search for new strength and inspiration. Poliakoff's oeuvre perfectly captures the spirit of the time, which is why he is considered one of the most important artists of the so-called Nouvelle École de Paris, whose representatives, including Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, and Pierre Soulages, shared the common goal of pushing the boundaries of abstract painting in Paris. In 1938, the artist presented his first abstract work at the Salon des Indépendants and soon discovered his individual and highly characteristic abstract style in the following years. Today, he is considered one of the most important protagonists of European Color Field Painting.

Poliakoff's compositions are based on a framework of jagged, irregular forms, occasionally filled with strong colors and sometimes with more delicate colors, which he arranges to create an interlocking structure resembling a puzzle. Free from external, social, or geographical influences, Poliakoff created a pictorial cosmos that anyone can enter through a thorough examination of the work of art.
In doing so, Poliakoff often played with the effects of his bold colors or the delicate, subtly graded nuances: Some of his works show a combination of strongly contrasting colors, while others feature only a few small, bold accents accompanied by a harmonious color scheme. He also explored the potential and effects of using just one or two different color groups as in the work offered here. In “Bleu,” the artist finds a wealth of nuances in combining an intense royal blue and white, which cover the entire impasto pictorial surface —his experimental use of color results in a particularly animated and vibrant surface texture. Several layers of thickly applied paint are superimposed, forming furrows and elevated structures, allowing the tonality of the underlying layers to shimmer through here and there and leading the eye, with the visible brushstrokes, to the expressive blue swirl in the center of the painting.

The artist had reached the zenith of his creative powers in the 1950s, and his works from this period are especially sought after on the international art market.
Poliakoff had already enjoyed great artistic success during his lifetime. In 1954, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York purchased the painting “Composition” from 1950. In 1956, the first monograph on the artist was published (author Michel Ragon). In the year the painting offered here was created, his works were shown in a large exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1962, 17 of his paintings filled a room in the French pavilion at the XXXI Venice Biennale.

The provenance
Shortly after it was completed, the painting featured in a solo exhibition at Galerie Otto Stangl, for which the artist visited Munich in August 1957. A few months later, Galerie Bing in Paris sold the work to the renowned collector Dr. Franz Meyer, a jurist living in Villa Brandt in Zurich's Riesbach district, today a listed building. Dr. Meyer's collection also included outstanding paintings by Ferdinand Hodler, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin that he had inherited. He expanded the collection with purchases of his own, including works by Robert Delaunay, Sam Francis, Amadeo Modigliani, Mark Rothko and Henri Rousseau (today in the Fondation Beyeler, Basel). After Meyer's death, the collection passed into the ownership of his son, also a jurist, with a PhD in art history. He was director of the Kunsthalle Bern from 1955 to 1961, followed by a term as director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, which lasted until 1980. As director of the Kunsthalle Bern, he was deeply involved in the organization of the major retrospective “Serge Poliakoff. Werke von 1937-1960”, which also included the present work. On the evening before the opening, Poliakoff invited the curators of the Kunsthalle to a grand dinner at Schloss Bellevue in Bern, which Meyer and his wife Ida Chagall, the daughter of the painter Marc Chagall, attended. The following evening, the Meyers hosted a party at their apartment on Herrengasse, which the artist also attended.

"Poliakoff's paintings have their own special silence which distinguishes them from the tumult of so much current artistic practice. [...] Allowing the work to take its effect, an elementary poetic force is released from the shapes, novel and different for each work of art. Poliakoff's work has the gravitiy and greatness seen in sacred art of past ages. One can clearly detect its affinity with icons."
Dr. Franz Meyer, quoted from: Alexis Poliakoff, Serge Poliakoff. Catalogue raisonné, vol. 2: 1955-1958, Paris 2010, p. 33.

The wonderful work remained in the possession of Dr. Franz Meyer jun. until 1994 and was shown in important exhibitions at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva (1964), the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (1966) and the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (1970). In 1997, the work finally came into the possession of a private collection in South Germany through Galerie Française in Munich. [CH]