Léon Zack

Léon Zack was born in 1892 near Nizhny Novgorod. He studied literature at Moscow University and painting with Rerberg and Mashkov, published poetry under the name Khrisanf among the Moscow futurists, and left Russia in 1920 for Rome, Florence and Berlin, where he designed for the Russian Romantic Theatre, before settling in Paris in 1923. There he painted and drew in a loose, expressive figurative manner, illustrated books, designed for the ballet and, after his conversion to Catholicism, painted religious subjects; he became a French citizen in 1938 and spent the war years in hiding in the south.

After 1947 his work turned to abstraction, and from the 1950s he was one of the painters of the Paris school of lyrical abstraction, with large canvases of soft, floating forms in a few colours, close in spirit to Bazaine and Manessier.

He also made stained glass and mosaics for churches, including Notre-Dame-des-Pauvres at Issy-les-Moulineaux. He died at Vanves in 1980. His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme and museums across France; the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Orléans gave him a retrospective in 1988.