Andre Lanskoy

Andre Lanskoy was born in Moscow on 31 March 1902. As a boy he attended the Cadet Corps school in Saint Petersburg, education interrupted by the Russian Revolution. After leaving Russia he spent time in Kiev, where he received brief, informal instruction from the painter Sergei Soudeikine; a claim that he also studied in Alexandra Exter's workshop appears in only one gallery source and is not corroborated elsewhere. He arrived in Paris in 1921 and studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, though no formal degree is documented in any surviving record.

He began showing at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1923, and his 1924 participation caught the attention of the German collector Wilhelm Uhde, an early boost to his reputation. Over the following decades Lanskoy developed a personal, densely worked style of abstraction built from thick color, becoming associated with the broader School of Paris and, later, with lyrical abstraction. He entered a sixteen-year working relationship with Galerie Louis Carre beginning in 1944, the same year he held a solo exhibition at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, and he continued to show at the Salon de Mai and the Salon des Realites Nouvelles through the late 1960s.

Later in his career Lanskoy turned to collage, producing a cycle of 169 collages illustrating Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman, exhibited at the museum in Saint-Etienne in 1968 and in Mulhouse in 1970. He died in Paris on 24 August 1976. A small number of dealer sources give the death date as 22 August 1976, but the more consistently cited date across encyclopedic and market references is 24 August.

Lanskoy is consistently described in gallery and reference sources as one of the foremost abstract painters of the postwar School of Paris and a leading exponent of lyrical abstraction. The critic Pierre Gueguen is quoted, in a phrase reproduced by Hanina Fine Arts, calling him "one of the greatest of all abstract painters," though the original publication and year of that assessment are not confirmed in current research. His standing was reinforced by a wide network of gallery exhibitions across Paris, London, New York, and Stockholm through the 1950s and 1960s, by inclusion in a major historical survey at the Centre Pompidou in 1981, and by a 2006 retrospective at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. No major prizes, state honors, or academy awards are documented for him in current research; his recognition rests on exhibition history and museum holdings rather than formal prizes.

Public auction data for Lanskoy is fragmented across databases and does not point to a single, fully documented record sale. Market aggregator MutualArt reports a high of USD 480,000 for a painting, but does not identify the work's title, the sale year, the auction house, the sale location, or the exact date, and no other source in current research corroborates that figure with additional detail. Other documented results sit well below that level: a market guide (Aucties) cites an oil on canvas sold for EUR 230,000 in 2019, again without title, house, or exact date, and Lempertz's results for the artist top out around EUR 93,000 including premium for Les Noirs gagnent, also without a confirmed sale date. Taken together, these figures suggest a market with meaningful but inconsistent depth, where the true top end is harder to verify than the steadier flow of mid-range results.

Andre Lanskoy died in 1976, so his market is a purely secondary one, with no living studio or foundation to verify new material. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, and current dealing runs chiefly through Paris galleries such as Applicat-Prazan and Opera Gallery rather than through a single authenticating body, which places extra weight on exhibition provenance when evaluating a specific work. Published auction results vary widely, from tens of thousands of dollars to a reported high near USD 480,000 whose underlying sale details are not publicly documented, so collectors should treat any single price point as an anchor rather than a settled benchmark. His deep presence in French public collections, led by the Centre Pompidou, is the more durable signal of his historical standing.