André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy — born Andrei Mikhailovich Lanskoy in Moscow in 1902 — arrived in Paris in 1921 following the upheaval of the Russian Civil War, and spent the remainder of his life working in France as a painter and printmaker. He became one of the distinctive voices associated with the postwar École de Paris and with lyrical abstraction, a current that placed feeling and chromatic intuition at the centre of pictorial construction. He died in 1976, leaving behind a body of work that moved with sustained conviction from early figuration to a fully developed abstract language rooted in colour, sign, and organic form.

Lanskoy's integration into the Parisian art world was rapid. Within two years of his arrival he was exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne and participating in group presentations at venues including Galerie La Licorne and Galerie Carmine. By 1924 he had entered into a contract with Galerie Bing, and a 1925 group exhibition there alongside Gromaire and Salvado marked an early moment of critical positioning within the city's emerging modernist circles. That same year he appeared in the Exposition des jeunes artistes russes at Galerie Henri, situating him among the generation of émigré artists reshaping the French capital's cultural landscape.

The arc of his development is legible across the public collections that hold his work. Two paintings from 1938 — Le repas, now at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, and En famille, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tourcoing — document the figurative practice from which his abstraction would grow. The transition is marked by Sans titre (1947–1948), in the Musée de l'Impression sur Étoffes in Mulhouse, a work falling squarely within the period of his decisive postwar reorientation. By 1953, Voyage à Arles had entered the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, confirming international recognition of his mature colour-based language. Later works extend this trajectory: Signe de vie (1961) at the Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne exemplifies the sign-based vocabulary central to his mature practice, while Le printemps mouvementé (1965) at the Musée de Grenoble captures the animated, chromatic energy of his 1960s output. Composition sur fond noir (1975), held at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, stands as evidence of an abstract language sustained without diminishment into the final years of his life.

Beyond painting, Lanskoy undertook a remarkable expansion of his practice with Diary of a Madman (1968), a cycle of 169 collages representing a sustained engagement with literary narrative through non-painterly means. His work is held in further institutional collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the LaM in Villeneuve d'Ascq, and the Musée de Grenoble, and his legacy is supported by an official digital catalogue raisonné, the André Lanskoy | Catalogue Raisonné Digital Officiel, accessible through OAM.