Nicolas de Stael

“Staël will surely be counted as one of the most influential painters of his generation. He stands out by reason of his adoption of a monumental style, his use of impasto and his solid yet refined blocks of colour: and he also had the courage to embrace a tradition when he deemed it necessary… His last paintings show that he was on the verge of yet another departure: he had achieved brilliant luminosity, the ‘clarité’ that he loved and so fervently sought…..His grandly optimistic painting stands strong and bold in the middle of our fluctuating age. It enjoys the same positive character that he had as a man: it has the quality of life enhancement.”

(Denys Sutton in Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Galleries Nationales du Grand Palais; London, Tate gallery, Nicolas de Staël, 1981, p. 15)

Nicolas de Staël‘s final years are widely acknowledged as his most groundbreaking and productive. Executed in 1954 just one year before de his tragic suicide at the height of his creative powers, Les Martigues (Composition) conveys the power and chromatic brilliance of the artist’s mature vision. De Staël was a staunchly individual painter and a true aesthete, whose inquisitive openness to new visual sources saw him constantly evolving his style: something that was profoundly influenced by his nomadic hunger for travel during the 1950s. The vibrant works of these last years like Les Martigues were the apex of his career and tantalisingly hint at the underlying forms of the landscape with the freedom and originality of a truly abstract artist. Radically altering his artistic vision from the complex geometric abstractions that had seen him embraced as the leading light of the post-war Ecole de Paris during the late 1940s, to the increasingly figurative and colourful compositions of his later work, this transition has shown itself to be one of the key developments in 1950’s European art. As Jean-Paul Ameline stated in the title for his essay at the artist’s major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2003, de Staël was “walking a tightrope between abstraction and figurative painting”.

De Staël’s personal, aesthetic and intellectual exuberance were guided by an urgency to live and to create. In the spring of 1954 De Staël had visited Les Martigues (known locally as Venise de Provence) where he was entranced by tranquil beauty of this lakeside village renowned for its flowers and gardens. Each masonry-like slab of paint in this beautifully poised composition has been thickly towelled onto the canvas with de Staël’s palette knife, and fits its neighbour as effortlessly and snugly as stones in a wall. Sumptuous impasto fields of green and red divide the canvas in a wonderfully pure tonal contrast of opposite colours. Bleeding together ever so slightly where they come together two thirds of the way up the canvas, this raw chromatic juxtaposition gives a physical sense of depth absent from de Staël’s tighter geometric abstractions of the late 1940s. Here quadrilateral forms float against this background, each glowing with its own distinct colour and revealing the strong influence of Cezanne particularly visible in works from this time. The shape of the blocks, sometimes touching their neighbours and sometimes not, echo the forms of the squares around them, as if they could be reassembled into a single, primal Pangaea. The pale blue rectangle, the most modest of all the colours here, is given the greatest thickness of matière, and instead of the more prominent colours outshining it, still seems even after fifty years as if it might spill and ooze over the surrounding green.

“To renew myself and develop,” de Staël explained, “I need always to function differently, going from one thing to another with no preconceived aesthetic”. He had a profound ability to appreciate and absorb the work of other artist and was particularly inspired by the bold, heroic gestures and unadulterated use of colour of the Abstract Expressionists. Their work cemented his own desire to bridge figurative and abstract forms of expression, although as de Staël was quick to point out, his interest in abstraction was not so much for its formal properties but more for its capacity to convey moods aroused in him by nature.

The distinctive vibrancy of de Staël’s colours has led to comparisons with the Fauves, since he used colour not merely to create space and light as well as form, but also in part to communicate an emotion about his subject. All art aspires to the state of music according to Walter Pater, and like Kandinsky, his great fellow Russian émigré, de Staël was aware of the musical connotations of the word “composition” when he chose it for the title of this work. Like a musical score, his painting is carefully built of harmonies and contrasts, resonances and accords of colour. In his seminal textbook for abstract art Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky writes "Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically." The role of the abstract artist, he continues “demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.”

A keen observer of nature, as his many sketches illustrate, de Staël’s restless movements reflected a need to see and to absorb an atmosphere. Douglas Cooper remembers how he would “suddenly stop and make drawings, no matter the time or place, whenever his eye registered a possible motif”. Carefully breaking down what he saw into underlying geometric forms, he would use these real subjects and the luminosity of his surroundings as the stimulus to painting. His vision however remained determinedly subjective, declaring “You never paint what you see or what you think you see…with a thousand palpitations you paint the blow received and still to be received, similar, different”.

Originally sold by Jacques Dubourg, de Staël’s Paris dealer, Les Martigues (Composition) was for many years part of the great Rita and Taft Schreiber Collection, which included works by Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko (see Fig. 1), Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and as well as some of Nicholas de Staël’s truly greatest works. In 1989 eighteen works from their collection, including de Staël’s View of Agrigente of 1953 (see Fig. 2), were given to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, who praised their benefactors’ acumen for collecting “a select, stellar group of masterpieces rather than a large survey of contemporary artworks”. Like the View of Agrigente, this work has a landscape as its genesis, but launches into a marvellous exercise in abstract colourism, and is a more a work of pure imagination than a representation of the place that inspired it. Douglas Cooper, a major collector and friend of de Staël’s last years, summarizes the artist’s remarkable achievement:

“It was no less an attempt to fuse into a glorious unity the essential contributions of the great art movements of the last 100 years. In these pictures abstract design is united with impressionistic immediacy, post-impressionist or fauve colour competes with colour used almost as an abstract element, the impartiality of the artist’s eye and his quick intelligence are pitted against strong emotions, bold simplifications accompany daring, anti-logical conceptions of design, things seen meet with things imagined, atmosphere vies with actuality.” (Douglas Cooper, Nicholas de Staël éditions Galerie Beyeler, Basel 1966)