“The purple and gray de Staël [Composition, 1951], for example, is a picture that I bought in fifteen seconds. I’d never heard of de Staël. I’d never seen one of his pictures. It was a case of love at first sight… I feel the same about the picture today that I did then.”
Executed at the height of Nicolas de Staël’s inimitable career, Composition from 1951 displays the artist’s highly assured and utterly distinctive painterly language to superb effect. Encrusted with richly textured striations of pigment set like jewels into a mosaic, the surface of the composition is imbued with a remarkable sensation of energy and dynamism, while the impastoed paint appears sculptural in its extraordinary depth. Formed of a concentrated cluster of violet, slate, ivory, and mauve blocks floating above a sage ground, Composition is a magnificent incarnation of de Staël’s mature aesthetic. These simplified, irregular squares, applied with a knife for maximum density, imply through their varied hues and tightly syncopated structure the atmospheric feeling of a bustling city. The artist’s singular mastery of the evocative qualities of paint are strikingly displayed in the present work’s juxtaposition of exquisite coloration and depth of texture, turning a quotidian urban scene into an abstract visual impression brimming with vitality and animation.
Painted in 1951, Composition reveals the influence of an exhibition on the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna which de Staël had recently seen and is arguably one of the most visually striking of a group of paintings which feature this highly distinctive segmentation into a block-like structure. His previous works of the 1940s had employed a somber palette, the violent passages of thickly worked pigment evocative of a certain darkness appropriate for the post-war mood; but by 1950, de Staël had shifted to more radiant tonalities, and works like Composition take on a luminous glow. Art historian Eliza E. Rathbone notes the importance of this series of works within the artist’s mature development: “Form as an evocation of mood or landscape is essentially banished from these works, which in their layering of hues suggest a search for subtle harmonies and variations on a theme, of point and counterpoint as in a piece of music” (Eliza R. Rathbone in: Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection (and travelling), Nicolas de Staël in America, 1990, p. 19). This concept of “musical harmonies” seems particularly apposite in the case of the present work, not only in the choice of title but also in the methodical layering of compositional elements, which appears to echo the repeated segments of a musical quotation or theme. Music was an important influence on de Staël’s work of the early to mid-1950s, an interest which is reflected in the titles of other paintings from this period including Nocturne (1950) and Fugue (1951-52), both in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
De Staël’s growing reputation in Europe by the beginning of the 1950s coincided with the artist’s increasing confidence in his own mastery of media, as he gradually began to superimpose his canvases with several layers of paint, often using unconventional tools like the palette knife. The refined abstraction of layered tesserae, his sensibility to imbue the picture plane with an inherent sense of space and velocity as well as his delicate color compositions ranging from bold contrasts to smooth complements are deeply rooted in a Modernist tradition. Indeed, as Rathbone observes, “To a large extent de Staël saw his work in relation to the great art of the past—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cézanne, Soutine, Matisse. De Staël studied the work of older masters both as a young man and throughout his years as an artist, from his frequent visits to the Louvre in the 1940s to his travels to Holland, Paris, Italy and finally in Spain, where he studied Velásquez and Goya” (ibid., p. 16). De Staël’s life-long obsession with landscape motifs recalls the splendid compositions of Rembrandt and Vermeer, while the rectangular shapes in the present work allude to the post-Impressionist patchwork patterns of Cézanne or the magnificent square compositions in Klimt’s portraits and landscapes, and the simultaneity of perspective and visual experience resonates with the Cubist paintings of Braque. Revealing the influence of these great masters in its opulent painterly facture, Composition draws together several elements from these past titans' creative endeavors yet re-interprets and superbly re-imagines them through de Staël’s unique praxis.
Right: Jean Dubuffet, Apartment Houses, Paris, 1946. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Fondtion Dubuffet, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A key element of this practice is de Staël’s signature fusion of abstraction with figuration, reconciling two ostensibly opposing styles while hovering thrillingly on the cusp of both, as deftly displayed by Composition. De Staël discussed his belief that a painting should follow both stylistic schools equally: “I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative. A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space” (the artist quoted in ibid., p. 22). The immediacy of de Staël’s response in Composition to a visual scene such as an urban landscape is prophetic of his later works, which were stimulated by lively motifs such as football players or the ballet. By merging things seen with things imagined, de Staël’s bold simplifications are joined by a vague image of the actual reality that translates through astonishing technical virtuosity into a pictorial vision of colorful sensation.
