Seven artists who pushed the boundaries of colour and form

‘A picture is a sum of destructions,’ said Pablo Picasso, one of the great creative destroyers of the modern era. Alongside his contemporaries, Picasso sought to forge a new artistic language — one that would break down the barriers of traditional hierarchies. As more artists joined this pursuit, their ambitious experiments propelled art ever further towards the realm of sublime abstraction. To mark the 20th/21st Century Art — Evening Sale at Christie’s in Paris on 15 April 2026, we highlight seven artists who drove colour and form to their extremes.

Claude Lalanne, ‘Pomme de New York’, 2008

‘I dream while waking,’ Claude Lalanne once said of her art. As part of the celebrated French duo Les Lalanne, she crafted fantastical sculptures from nature, submerging leaves, butterfly wings and fruit in baths of copper sulphate to create strange and wondrous forms. She derived particular satisfaction from magnification, scaling up cabbages and snail shells into otherworldly delights. This giant Pomme is just such a provocation, playing on the nickname of New York City as the ‘Big Apple’.

Maurice de Vlaminck, La Femme au chapeau, 1906

A committed anarchist and self-taught painter, Maurice de Vlaminck believed that Fauvism — a ferocious form of avant-garde art — offered the best strategy for radical change. The Fauves (‘wild beasts’), as they were known, embraced a brilliant, anti-establishment aesthetic that combined violent colour, rough brushwork and spontaneity to provoke a jarring reaction in the viewer. ‘With my cobalts and vermilions, I wished to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,’ he declared.

In this work, Vlaminck abandons naturalism entirely: paint is applied in thick slabs, ignoring skin tone, light, shadow and form. ‘I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method, and conveyed it not so much artistically as humanely,’ he said.

Salvatore Scarpitta, South Turn, 1962

In 1956, Salvatore Scarpitta decided to tear painting apart. Frustrated by the unwieldy properties of oil paint and chafing under the weight of history, he ripped the canvas into strips and bound them tightly across the frame. At the time, he described it as ‘giving the canvas a beating’. It was a cathartic act, but also one that acknowledged his debt to artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The wrapped canvases resemble bandages around a ribcage; Scarpitta remarked that it was a way of stopping the paint from slipping off the canvas — ‘It had to be staunched, like one would staunch a wound.’

Serge Poliakoff, Composition abstraite, 1967

Music lies at the core of Serge Poliakoff’s paintings. The artist played with colours and shapes, their tensions and harmonies, just as a composer might play with notes, creating a dynamic language of sensual connections. Born in Russia in 1900, he escaped to Paris during the revolution, supporting himself by playing the guitar in cabarets. It was a ramshackle, bohemian life, and the vibrancy of the theatre was reflected in his paintings. Over the years, the real world disappeared entirely from his art, leaving only an abstracted language of colourful interlocking forms.

Anna-Eva Bergman, No. 1-1964 Urbanisme, 1964

Anna-Eva Bergman once said: ‘I see the entire cosmic mystery through colours and geometry.’ There is an unearthly beauty to the Norwegian radical abstractionist’s paintings, which reveal her training as an ecclesiastical artist and the influence of the bleak Scandinavian landscape. Her wintry geometric canvases, with their applied silver and gold, shimmer depending on light conditions, requiring an active kind of looking by the observer. They have a chimerical quality — a lingering sense of something darting beyond the shadows.

Le Corbusier, Nature morte claire à l’as de pique, 1922

‘Art should not be accidental, exceptional or impressionistic,’ declared Le Corbusier. Celebrated for his modular structures, the architect applied the same rigour to painting, establishing, with the artist Amédée Ozenfant, the ‘Purism’ movement — a kind of rational, ordered Cubism. Le Corbusier’s compositions tended to focus on still lifes of functional, mass-produced objects such as coffee pots, bottles and vases. Everything, he believed, should be filtered through a cold sense of restraint and control.

Olga de Amaral, Poblado L, 2016

Like Le Corbusier, the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral began her career by training as an architect. Her luminous sculptures are partly inspired by the Constructivist artists of the 1920s, as well as by her meeting with the ceramicist Lucie Rie, who introduced her to the Japanese technique of kintsugi (the process of repairing breakages using lacquer mixed with gold powder). ‘My search centred on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light,’ she said. This was achieved by weaving thin strips of cloth painted with gold leaf into delicate wall hangings that ripple and shimmer when people walk by.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place at Christie’s in Paris and online until 17 April 2026, and will be on view until 16 April. Explore the preview exhibition and sales