Serge Charchoune (1888 - 1975)
Composition Inspirée par le Credo de la Messe en C Mineur de Bach
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Oil on canvas
116 x 73 cm (45 5/8 x 28 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated lower right, Charchoune 1959
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Literature
Pierre Guenegan, Charchoune Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4, 1951-1960, Lanwell & Leeds Ltd., 2011, no.1958/012, p. 208 (illustrated)
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Description
This work is accompanied by a certificate from Pierre Guénégan.
This original painting by Serge Charchoune is available for immediate purchase.
Artist's Biography
A Russian-born French artist and poet, Serge Charchoune was born in Buguruslan and studied painting in Moscow before settling in Paris in 1912. He enrolled at the Académie de la Palette, where he worked with Henri Le Fauconnier and encountered Cubism.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he took refuge in Barcelona, forming friendships with Marie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes and Francis Picabia. In Paris during the 1920s he engaged closely with Dada: he briefly organised the circle Palata Poetov (House of Poets), issued the Russian-language magazine Perevoz Dada (Travelling Dada) and published an anthology of Dada poetry in German, French and Russian.
Charchoune remained attached to Dada’s experimental ethos while, from the mid-1920s, absorbing aspects of Purism after contact with Amédée Ozenfant. A solo exhibition at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, in 1922 consolidated his reputation.
From the early 1950s his painting moved toward a pared-back abstraction, often near-monochrome, with finely graded modulations. Critics such as Michel Seuphor noted his restraint and his frequent recourse to musical structures; Charchoune himself spoke of music as a generative theme for composition.
He exhibited widely in France and abroad, including in Barcelona, Stockholm, Brussels, New York, Geneva and Prague. A major retrospective was presented at the Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1971.
