Nicolas de Staël

Gimpel Fils, London
Galerie Mott, Geneva
Jacques Dubourg, Paris
Galerie Nathan, Zürich
Acquired directly from the above in the mid 1960s

In 1952 de Staël was considered by many to be the most significant young painter to emerge in post-war Europe. His sensuous, thick impasto and geometric compositions earned him acknowledgement as one of the leading figures of the Ecole de Paris movement of abstract artists. In the aftermath of the Second World War, these artists found solace in the evocation of geometric form and pure colour on canvas – a European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism. However, de Staël’s enviable success and originality of vision brought with it the burden of being the standard bearer as he explored the boundaries of painterly expression.

A letter written in that very year provides an early indication of de Staël’s frustration and tormented disposition that was to deteriorate over the next few years and lead to his tragic suicide in 1955, aged only 44. “I am thinking of being able to develop, God knows how, an increase in the clarity of painting and that puts me in a permanently disagreeable and troubled state.” (letter to Denys Sutton in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Nicolas de Staël, 1981, p. 14) Ironically, it was this very feeling of turmoil and angst that was to produce the artist’s most powerful and expressive work as he sought to bridge the gap between abstraction and figuration.

Having previously struggled to express his personal and visual conflicts in non-figurative terms, 1952 marks the crucial turning point in his career when he conceded that his preferred style could no longer serve his expressive desires and intense artistic vision. Effectively reversing the course of his aesthetic development, de Staël threw himself into his work with a renewed sense of vigour and determination, producing simple, balanced compositions characterised by their freshness of vision and purity of thickly applied colour.

Nature Morte is a beautiful example from this decisive period in de Staël’s career, in which the artist’s returning confidence, as well as the ingenuity of his poetic vision, are powerfully conveyed in this still life. de Staël here is directly taking on the rich history of still-life painting and providing his own, highly unique contemporary vision which is primarily concerned with the placement of colour in space. One is immediately struck by the dramatic horizon line which dissects the composition. Traditionally seen as the line which would usually create the distance between the foreground and the background with gently fading tones indicating the graduation of distance, here de Staël introduces virtually flattened, complimentary tones of green and red. Thickly applied with a palette knife in a movement which sweeps directly across the canvas, the thin line which lies at the centre of the canvas is actually the under-layer of paint. As such, de Staël here creates an archaic, almost fossilised approach to his colour. Hidden beneath the deep, multilayered condensed surface, one catches ethereal glimpses of the pinkish underlayer that de Staël employed to visually unite all areas of the composition, its uniform application providing a dynamic contrast to the impastoed forms that emerge from the flat canvas.

The depth and richness of subtle tones bound within the scarlet red plane of the present work are harmoniously balanced by the blend of sumptuous, verdant greens that fuse together in its juxtaposition. These areas sublimely frame the scattered forms which build the ‘subjects’. Drawn by the warmth of colour, de Staël here inspires us to ‘perceive’ objects rather than directly translate them for our eyes. He endorses a ‘conversation’ with his viewer. His version of still-life encourages a chromatic atmosphere of enlightenment, in which all of the objects are stripped down to their most basic shape and colour. A sense of calm is exuded by the overt modesty and intimacy of the composition, and as such de Staël’s fresh pictorial aesthetic is powerfully announced, endorsing the joys of simple living. Through his preoccupation with purity of composition and depth of colour, “de Staël approaches his spectator through direct emotion drawn from life … concealed by the apparent curtain of the non-figurative.” (Pierre Granville in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Nicolas de Staël, 1981, p. 7)