Nicolas de Stael

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
Jacques Helft, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Private Collection, United Kingdom

New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Nicolas de Staël, 1958, no. 21
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Aspekte 1944-1965, 1966, cat. no. 56, illustrated in colour

Jacques Dubourg and Françoise De Staël, Nicolas de Staël Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures, Paris 1968, p. 331, no. 812, illustrated
Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël Catalogue Raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 555, pl. 877, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original, particularly the red bottle in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the rich texture of the brushstrokes in the black background. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is light frame rubbing along the extreme right lower edge towards the lower right corner, and scattered at intervals along all four edges and corner tips. There are two very minor media accretions to the left of the small blue bottle. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Nicolas de Staël's final years are widely acknowledged as his most groundbreaking and productive. Executed in 1954, just one year before his tragic suicide at the height of his creative powers, Cinq Bouteilles conveys the brilliance of the artist's mature vision. Remarkable for its simplicity of form, stark palette and emotive fluidity, here de Staël distils the visual world of his studio environment into a painting of incredible presence. With great painterly confidence and economy of means, de Staël pares down and schematises a row of five bottles arranged on a table top, his fluid brushstrokes releasing their rhythmical forms. To the right, paint brushes stand in a jar of turpentine, brilliantly offset by the small, piercing white form to the left. In the centre, the otherwise sombre palette is punctuated by the shrill cadmium scarlet form which anchors the composition. Simply contoured, these vessels of various shape and usage are reduced to their essence of form and colour, isolated against a sublimely textured and divided black ground.

 

Bridging figurative and abstract modes, in Cinq Bouteilles de Staël tantalisingly hints at the underlying forms of the arranged objects but with the freedom and originality of a truly abstract artist. This was the summation of his lifelong research into painting, which brought him to the fault line between figurative and abstract modes of painting. Contrary to most artists of the post-war period, de Staël's artistic journey led him from abstraction to figuration. Throughout the 1940s, he was hailed as the leading abstract artist of his generation. His sensuously thick, impasto compositions had earned him recognition as one of the leading figures of the Ecole de Paris, who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, had found solace in the evocation of geometric form and pure colour on canvas - a kind of European response to the Abstract Expressionism that was sweeping through America.

 

At the height of his recognition, however, de Staël made a bold stylistic decision which is without question one of the most important and influential moments in the history of European painting. Turning his back on the geometric style of abstract painting which he had pioneered so successfully, in the early 1950s he re-embraced the figurative mode, but with all the knowledge and insight gained over a decade of abstraction. It is this complete understanding of abstract principles which lends his late figurative work its freshness. Although made over half a century ago, works like Cinq Bouteilles were so completely ahead of their time that they do not look out of place alongside today's innovators in painting, like Luc Tuymans.

 

Throughout the early 1950s, de Staël travelled with a quasi-nomadic urgency before finally settling in Antibes in 1954 and establishing his studio there. In contrast to the shattering blue light that pervades many of his Mediterranean landscapes and seascapes of the period, Cinq Bouteilles is a brooding still life evocative of his increasing sense of isolation and despair. In Antibes, de Staël began to paint in total isolation with unprecedented obsessive passion, and the works executed in the last two years of his life marked another radical stylistic departure for him. Relinquishing the palette knife which he had employed to apply great slabs of pigment to the surface of his paintings, in Cinq Bouteilles we see how he to deliberately thins his oils with turpentine in search of a more expressive gesture using the brush. Areas of thicker paint, like the white form to the left, stand out against areas which are very thinly brushed. Liberated from servitude to the deeply textured materiality of paint, in his late oeuvre de Stael discovers a freshness and immediacy that oozes painterly confidence.

 

Hovering between absolute form and formlessness, between three-dimensional illusionism and surface abstraction, the present work achieves a sublime clarity of expression. The three-dimensional space of the table top is created by a second layer of black paint, darker and glossier in the upper half of the canvas, which creates a horizon line which inclines from left to right behind the bottles. Conventionally, this device anchors the objects in space and aids the eye to discern a three-dimensional spatial relationship. However, just like Cézanne, de Stael deliberately ruptures this stability, setting off an equivocalness which energises the composition. The horizon line, instead of joining up in a continuous line from left to right, is fractured and disjointed and seemingly does not join up behind the objects. This device can be seen in Still Life works by Cézanne, such as Pot of Flowers and Pears, circa 1885, in the Courtauld Institute of Art Collection. The effect is to reinforce the abstract relationships, to see the forms not as representations of objects in life but as interlinked elements in a picture. At the same time that Ad Reinhardt was making his first black paintings using a similar device of black on black, de Staël was making his own exploration into the rich seam between abstraction and representation. Carefully breaking down what he sees into its underlying geometric forms, de Staël uses these real subjects as the stimulus for his paintings. However, his abstract training teaches him to arrange forms and colours on the canvas according to other laws, so that although Cinq Bouteilles has a still life at its genesis, it launches into a marvellous exercise in abstract colourism in which painting is pared down to its most essential attributes.

Cinq Bouteilles is a beautiful example from the crowning moment in de Staël's career, in which the ingenuity and turmoil of his poetic vision are powerfully resolved. Within this composition of superlative balance, freshness and fluidity, de Staël finally achieves the harmonious tension and ambiguity he had obsessively sought throughout his career.