André Lanskoy was born in Moscow but moved to France in 1921, where he would spend most of his life. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and was drawn to the city's museums and galleries, where the expressive brushwork and colour palette of James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh became a clear influence on his early still lifes, interiors and landscapes.

Lanskoy's early work was mainly figurative, as shown in his first group exhibition with Russian painters at Galerie La Licorne in 1923. The collector and art dealer Wilhelm Uhde discovered him at the Salon d'Automne in 1924 and organised a solo exhibition the following year, which led to acquisitions by several prominent museums and collectors. Together with other Paris-based Russian artists, such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Leopold Survage and Ossip Zadkine, he continued to exhibit and reach an increasingly wide audience.

In 1937, Lanskoy moved towards an increasingly abstract style, and from 1942 he devoted himself entirely to abstract expressionism. Over the following decades he exhibited at a number of important galleries, including Galerie Louis Carré in Paris (1948), Galerie Jacques Dubourg (1951), The Tooth and Sons Gallery (1953) and the Loeb Gallery in New York (1959).

The present work, executed circa 1965, shows Lanskoy at the height of his painterly language. The grand, vertical composition is built up of tightly interlocking, impasto brushstrokes in deep violet and blue tones, broken by earthy ochres and greens. Beneath the rich surface, light, linear contours can be glimpsed, lending the painting an underlying architecture — a testament to Lanskoy's lifelong exploration of the interplay between colour and form, and to his fascination with the pattern-rich, rhythmic worlds of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.