Serge Mendjisky French, 1929-2017

Serge Mendjisky was born in Paris in 1929 into a household where painting was the family trade. His father, the painter Maurice Mendjizky, had settled in Paris among the international community of artists working in Montparnasse, and it was under his instruction that Serge first learned to draw and paint. Formal training followed at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the late 1940s, where his earliest work reflected the academic manner of his teachers. He soon set this aside in favour of a pointillist technique, applied principally to landscape and the city. In 1949 Mendjisky moved to Nice to commit himself to painting full time. The Mediterranean coast gave him one of the two subjects that would occupy him throughout his career; the other was Paris. His handling in these years shifted from a structural approach informed by Cézanne towards the divided colour of Seurat, placing him in a direct line of descent from the Neo-Impressionists. His progress drew the attention of established artists working in the south of France, among them Jacques Villon and Picasso, both of whom encouraged the young painter. A first solo exhibition in Paris came in 1959, and within a year his work was being shown in New York and Los Angeles. His works are held in private and public collections internationally, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Mendjisky died in Paris in 2017.