Nicolas de Stael

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1954

New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Recent Paintings by Nicolas de Staël, 1954, no. 23

New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Nicolas de Staël, 1955, no. 14

Jacques Dubourg & Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures, Paris 1968, p. 274, no. 645, illustrated

Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de L'Oeuvre Peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 480, no. 73, illustrated

Following the outstanding group of works offered from the Estate of Sarabel Florsheim in New York this past November, Sotheby’s is delighted to present Paysage à Agrigente by Nicolas de Staël. Acquired by Sarabel Florsheim within a year of its execution, this work was the very first of a famous cycle of paintings, entitled Agrigente, which took the Sicilian light as their inspiration and coincided with his rapid rise to fame in America, relatively late in his tragically short artistic life. Following the outstanding success of Knoedler Gallery’s breakthrough exhibition in New York in 1953, Paul Rosenberg lost no time in asking if he could become the artist’s exclusive American dealer and it was during his exhibition in New York in February 1954 that Sarabel Florsheim fell in love with this painting (see Fig. 1).

It is testament to Sarabel Florsheim’s exquisite eye that she recognised this outstanding European talent at a time when the American Abstract Expressionists were at their peak and relatively few American collectors were looking across the Atlantic. De Staël’s earlier post-war works were directly inspired by his American counterparts and were purely abstract in their inspiration and execution. However, during the early 1950s a transformation began to occur in which de Staël’s genius became apparent in his ability to infuse his abstract forms with specifically figurative inspiration and light. His name became synonymous with the area to which he moved and adopted as his home, the Mediterranean. Although he lived in Lagnes and Cap d’Antibes in France, during 1953 he travelled a great deal. Following his trip to New York to oversee the installation of his highly successful exhibition at Knoedler’s, he spent most of the year in pursuit of the Mediterranean light that had made such an impact on his work the summer before. Most significantly he rented a car and toured Sicily with his family during the height of the summer. He was completely consumed by the stark contrast between the humid, arid light of the south of Italy compared with the comforting warmth of the coastal light in the south of France and commented to Jacques Dubourg that same year: “the culminating point was Agrigento and the museum at Syracuse” (quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, Washington D.C., The Phillips Collection; Cincinnati, Art Museum, Nicolas de Staël in America, 1990, p. 33)  

Following this trip, he returned to Lagnes to create a suite of paintings, beginning with Paysage à Agrigente, which conveyed this tremendous visual experience. In complete contrast to the blues, reds and whites which express the serene comfort of the paintings from the south of France, de Staël here adopts beiges, ochres and yellows to build the dry, parched landscape of the South. De Staël’s dramatic simplification of the scene distils the essence of his perception to recreate the rugged monumentality of the Sicilian hills interspersed with aspects of the seven imposing ancient temples which pepper the landscape. Using a palette knife to ‘sculpt’ the wedges of scorched colour, de Staël cultivates a precise expression of light through colour, defined by diagonals that lead the eye to the horizon. In addition, he brings a sense of the classical harmony to the setting by interspersing overlapping geometric bands. Faced with such a historic subject, it seems apt that de Staël should create a ‘hard won’ image by building chromatic layer upon chromatic layer, leaving an archaeology of colour at each planar intersection to build a physical presence equal to its subject. Furthermore, an abstract sense of perspective develops whereby the deep, rich umber form at the bottom of the composition could represent the ‘foreground’ and the opaque grey at the top of the composition could represent the ‘background’ or sky. At the same time, however, all of the colours seem to coalesce into an all over abstract composition, and it is this friction between the apparent solidity of the figurative and the relative intangibility of the abstract which sets his finest works apart.

When seen in comparison to the other major landscape painting from the Estate of Sarabel Florsheim, Claude Monet’s La Route de Vétheuil (see Fig. 2), one can see how the gradual fragmentation of the landscape which began with Monet in the late 19^th century and continued through Pointilism and Cubism reaches its zenith in the work of de Staël. Containing a similar yellow light, although albeit less arid, Monet here had begun to create patterns and rhythms in his brushstrokes which diminished the illusion of space and began to analyse the abstract character of the painted surface. Again the composition is constructed from a series of classical diagonals but whereas the figurative aspect of the painting still takes precedence here, in de Staël’s painting 73 years later, the pendulum has swung towards the abstract.     

The fragmentation of the painted surface which took place in those intervening years is what defines Modernism and it is the recognition of this fact at the moment when few others understood it, which underpins Sarabel Florsheim’s taste and exceptionally complete understanding of the arts. She acquired another outstanding work by de Staël as well as the Monet during those years. The other, Fleurs Blanches et Jaunes also from 1953 was gifted to the Arts Club of Chicago in 1997. In much the same way as Nicolas de Staël, Sarabel Florsheim spent every waking day studying quality in fine art and design, which she refined through constant exposure and travel. Both the artist and the collector lived on a brave intuition which was honed over a lifetime.