painter and lithographer, one of the most widely recognized of the abstract colourists who flourished after World War II.

Educated in Moscow and London, he left Russia in 1918 and resided in Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna, and Berlin until 1923, when he made Paris his permanent home. First a guitarist and then a figurative painter, he was converted to abstract art by the examples of Robert Delaunay (Delaunay, Robert) and Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily), both of whom he met in 1937. Poliakoff held his first one-man Paris exhibition in 1945.

His abstractions generally consist of irregular, adjoining geometric shapes in striking, self-revealing colours. Technical and decorative in conception, they earned Poliakoff a significant place among the postwar abstract painters.