Although he was a friend and contemporary of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Serge Charchoune's reluctance to associate too closely with any one group contributed to his prolonged relative obscurity. ARTnews "introduced" Charchoune to the general public in 1960, the year of his first solo exhibition in the United States. Man Ray took his photography in 1925 shortly after Charchoune's break with Dadaism. Put off by the political elements of the Dadaist movement, Charchoune pursued an unapologetically ornamental style of abstract painting influenced by Spanish-Moorish art and the icons of his native Russia.

Source:
"Serge Charchoune", Portrait of the Art World, A Century of ARTnews Photographs, /www.npg.si.edu/cexh/artnews/charc.htm

The achievement of Franco-Russian painter Serge Charchoune (1889-1975) is among the least widely known or understood in twentieth-century European art. Sometimes seen as a minor practitioner of major modernist styles—Dada, Cubism, Purism, informal abstraction—Charchoune in fact operated quite independently within and beyond those tendencies. He was an unpredictable individualist, who in his resistance to stylistic conformity and his ambiguous relationship to taste presages a strain of post-conceptual painting only fully recognized toward the turn of the twenty-first century.

Source:
Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago

Serge Charchoune was born in 1888 in Buguruslan (Orenburg). He studied from 1908-10 with Ilya Ivanovich Maškov, Konstantin Fedorovic Yuon and Ivan Osipovic Dudin in Moscow. While in military service, he came to Paris in 1912, where he studied at the Academie Russe Libre and the Academie La Palette under Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger and André Dunoyer de Segonzac. This was followed by exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913-14.

After a short stay in Barcelona, he returned to Paris. In 1922-23 he visited Berlin, where he exhibited at Herwarth Walden's gallery ‘Der Sturm’. He died in 1975. His work is both abstract and representational.