André Lanskoy

Biography

In 1924, at the Salon d’Automne, the collector Wilhelm Uhde stopped in front of “La Noce” (The Wedding), a painting by an unknown Russian émigré. He began buying Lanskoy’s work, and a year later helped him to a first solo exhibition.

André Lanskoy was born in Moscow into an aristocratic family: his father was Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Lanskoy, his mother Varvara Vasilyevna, née Parusinova. Sources give his birth date differently: 31 March 1902 or 5 March 1903; the first is adopted here. He was a great-grandson of Sergei Stepanovich Lanskoy. By one account, the family moved to St. Petersburg after 1905, where he graduated from the Corps of Pages, the elite military school; by another, they fled to Kiev during the revolution. In Kiev he began to paint and, by some accounts, took lessons from Sergei Sudeikin. In the Civil War he served as a volunteer in the White Army, and in 1920 left Russia with it. He made his way through Constantinople to Paris and in 1921 settled in Montparnasse. He later recalled that he began to paint literally on the very first night and had not stopped since.

In Paris he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and, by some accounts, in Sudeikin’s studio. He met Serge Poliakoff, and later Nicolas de Staël. He spent much time in museums; to my mind the colour of James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh left a clear mark on him, and by some accounts Matisse and Soutine did too. In 1923 he took part in a group exhibition of Russian painters at the La Licorne gallery, and after his success at the Salon d’Automne of 1924 and his solo exhibition of 1925, museums and major private collectors bought his work. At the Galerie Bing he grew close to the collector Roger Dutilleul, a friendship that lasted into the 1940s. He also exhibited alongside Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Léopold Survage and Ossip Zadkine.

Lanskoy came to abstraction gradually. After 1937 he studied Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky; the sources give different years for the change, 1939 or 1942. After 1942 he painted only abstract works. The interaction of form and colour became his main theme: in his words, every brushstroke is in itself a transformed reality, but it receives its true meaning only among the surrounding shades.

In 1944 he showed work at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery, where he met Nicolas de Staël. From 1948 he exhibited together with him; that same year there was a show at the Louis Carré Gallery, and in 1951 at Galerie Jacques Dubourg. In the 1950s international recognition came: the Tooth and Sons gallery showed him in 1953, Fine Arts Associates in New York in 1956, and the Loeb Gallery in New York in 1959. He took part in the second and third documenta exhibitions in Kassel (1959, 1964). Besides painting, Lanskoy made book illustrations, tapestries, mosaics and collages. In 1966 he had an exhibition at the Musée Galliéra in Paris, and in 1969 at the Neue Galerie in Zurich.

From 1962 he worked on a large project: original prints and collages for Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”. The work continued until his death and produced about 150 collages and 80 lithographs.

Lanskoy died on 24 August 1976 in Paris, by some accounts in his studio. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. In 1989 the Aras Gallery brought together the whole series of prints for Gogol and staged a major posthumous exhibition. His works are held, among other places, in the Petit Palais Museum of Modern Art in Geneva and in the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art. In Russia he was shown in 2006 at the Museum of Private Collections at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and in 2009 at the Hermitage art gallery.