Recalling his arrival in the French capital, Lanskoy said: "Literally in the first night I started to paint and I haven’t stopped since."

Lanskoy spent a lot of time at museums and was influenced by James Ensor’s and Vincent van Gogh’s use of color.

Wilhelm Uhde discovered Lanskoy’s paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1924 and became a collector of his works in the years that followed.

In 1962, he began to work on a large project of original prints and collages to accompany Nikolai Gogol’s novel Diary of a Madman.

The Aras Gallery collected the extensive Diary of a Madman series of prints and staged a major posthumous exhibition in 1989.