André Lanskoy, La Bataille d'Uccello, circa 1968
06 May 2025
In La Bataille d'Uccello, André Lanskoy harnesses abstraction not as escape, but as a heightened means of confronting reality anew. Painted circa 1968, a year that saw mass civil unrest in the artist’s adoptive home of Paris, La Bataille d'Uccello – much like Picasso’s Guernica three decades earlier – demonstrates the power of painting to respond to political upheaval on its own terms, providing viewers with a new way to understand and confront the world around us.
Panoramic in scale at almost two metres in width, its format brings to mind the centuries-old tradition of war painting. Indeed, its name references the 15th century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello, whose painting of Battle of San Romano has become a classic example of the genre. At Lanskoy’s hand, the war painting is enlivened with many-coloured forms that dance across the canvas. La Bataille d'Uccello, by distinctly non-figurative means, conveys a scene replete with perfectly-calibrated movement; an interplay of shape, colour and line where conflict and balance exist in harmony. In it, the fraught, unbridled energy that unites the San Romano of 1432 and the Paris of 1968 is translated into paint.
For Lanskoy, a Russian-born painter who spent his adult life in Paris, a leading figure of the Tachisme movement, abstraction necessarily mirrored the world around it. His goal was not to abstract from life but to render it differently, revealing things about reality itself that figuration might not capture. Famously, he described his oeuvre as comprising “non-figurative works from nature, or rather from life and always in harmony with life.”
There are, however, moments where this image threatens to defy the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Vague suggestions of cartoonish feet at the bottom and round, head-like forms at the top are barely discernible but give this painting the essence of a procession of marching soldiers. With early influences including Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Chaïm Soutine, Lanskoy is a painter well-versed in finding figures and landscapes within the materiality of paint.
Another key influence in Lanskoy’s ability to imbue abstract forms with emotion and latent sense of representation was French painter Nicolas de Staël, who he met in 1944 and later shared a studio with. The affinity between the two artists, both of whom were associated with the New School of Paris alongside luminaries such as Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu, is clear. both were instrumental in refining abstract painting, steering it away from the raw gesturalism of Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Lanskoy and de Staël took a more measured approach that allowed their paintings, though abstract, to tell stories and evoke places and times. La Bataille d'Uccello is among the clearest examples of this development.
Today, the line between abstraction and figuration continues to blur. In the work of present-day masters such as George Condo and Kenny Scharf, we see a continuation of Lanskoy’s synthesis between elliptical representation and pure form. La Bataille d'Uccello was a war painting decades ahead of its time, and stands today as a monument to abstraction’s proximity to real life. It remains a landmark in the history of abstraction, at once a product of its moment and a prescient vision of painting’s enduring narrative power.
La Bataille d'Uccello will be included in Opera Gallery New York’s forthcoming exhibition 'Lines in Motion', which runs from 06 until 31 May.
