Serge Ponomarew: A Sculptor’s Pointillism

A slate-blue pavilion with a pointed roof stands on a mound at the end of a garden, half hidden by trees, and everything around it is built from small, thick dabs of pure colour over a warm ochre ground that shows through everywhere: a carpet of pink, red and yellow flowers in front, a shimmer of green and black in the trees, a mosaic of blue and cream in the sky. Serge Ponomarew (1911–1984) painted it in 1965, and the canvas, signed, dated and still carrying his printed biographical label on the reverse, is now in our gallery at a fixed price.

From Minsk to the Beaux-Arts

Ponomarew was born in Minsk on 20 August 1911. The revolution and the civil war carried his family west, and by 1920 he was in Vilnius, where he began his studies. In 1932 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the sculpture studio of Henri Bouchard, went back to Poland for three years of commissions, among them work for a church in Vilnius, returned to Paris in 1937, completed his studies in 1944 and stayed in France for the rest of his life. He showed at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon Comparaisons. His name appears in the sale rooms as Ponomarew, Ponomarev and Ponomarjoff; the full biography is on his artist page.

A sculptor and medallist first

For most of his career Ponomarew was a sculptor. He carved in stone and modelled for bronze, and from the 1960s he designed art medals struck by the Paris Mint: a Borodin of 1966, a Rimsky-Korsakov of 1967, an Apocalypse of Saint John of 1964 for the Club français de la Médaille, a Pegasus. These medals still pass through the numismatic trade in numbers, and they explain the paintings. The dabs of colour on this canvas are raised and glossy, closer to enamel or to modelled relief than to the dry, even touch of Seurat; a sculptor’s hand built the surface.

The late paintings and where they stand

Painting took over in his last twenty-five years, and the subjects are the ones a Paris studio painter chose when he wanted to paint for pleasure: gardens, flowers, trees, village streets, landscapes of the Île-de-France. The manner is a personal pointillism, learned from the Neo-Impressionists but freer and more decorative, in the same current as Paul Flaubert and Yvonne Canu, the two painters who kept the dot alive in France into the 1990s. Ponomarew is the rarer of the three on the market and the only one who came to it from sculpture. On the wider story of Russian and Eastern European painters who settled in Paris, see our article on the École de Paris.

Ponomarew at auction

His paintings appear a few times a year, mostly in French regional sales and occasionally in London: MacDougall’s offered By the Candle, an oil of 1980, with an estimate of 2,000–3,000 GBP in October 2021. Dealer prices for the pointillist canvases run from several hundred to a few thousand euros depending on size, subject and date, with the fully pointillist gardens and flower pieces of the 1960s the most wanted. At 1,600 € at a fixed price, with no buyer’s premium, this canvas sits in the middle of that range for a signed and dated work of 55 × 38.5 cm in a period frame.

At Aurora & Athena

Garden Pavilion among Flowers, 1965, oil on canvas, 55 × 38.5 cm, in a gilt moulded frame with a dark green slip (71.5 × 55 cm), signed S. Ponomarew at the lower left, dated 65 at the lower right and inscribed 1965 on the stretcher, is in our gallery at 1,600 €. The price is final; Buy now reserves the work for 48 hours while you pay by bank transfer or card, the page shows the shipping estimate for your address, and the work can be seen in Barcelona by appointment. Photographs of the surface, the signature and the label on the reverse are on the work’s page.