Nicolas de Staël

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
Mr & Mrs. Walter Ross, New York (acquired in 1953)
Sale: Parke Bernet, New York, 21 October 1964, Lot 50
Norton Simon, Los Angeles
Sale: Parke Bernet, New York, 13 May 1970, Lot 75
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the 1980s

New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Recent Paintings by Nicolas de Staël, 1954, no. 20
New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Nicolas de Staël, 1963, no. 12

Burlington Magazine, London, No. 739, October 1964, illustrated
Artforum, No. 9, May 1970, p. 12, illustrated
Jacques Dubourg and Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné  des Peintures, Paris 1968, p. 264, no. 589, illustrated
Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 427, no. 596, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Nicolas de Staël, 2003, p. 168, illustrated in installation view of 1954 exhibition at Paul Rosenberg & Co., Recent Paintings by Nicolas de Staël

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The illustration fails to convey the rich texture of the paint surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are networks of unobtrusive stable craquelure to the orange and green areas, and a few horizontal hairline cracks to the central grey and pink areas. There is a minute loss and associated rub mark towards the left of the top edge, which are evident in the catalogue illustration. There is some minor frame rubbing along the extreme bottom edge, only visible out of the frame. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals several areas of restoration in the central green carafe, one to the centre of the right edge of the orange area, and one to the lower right edge near the bottom right corner.
"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."

Executed just two years before his tragic suicide, Nicolas de Staël's Nature Morte à la Carafe of 1953 is a compositional and colouristic tour de force of fantastic scale that summates the heights of his fully resolved artistic language. Outstanding for its bold hues and stark interaction of semi-geometric forms, this work distils the visual world of a quotidian domestic environment into a painting of incredible presence. With terrific confidence and economy of means, de Staël pares down and schematises the still life elements while also injecting the composition with a lyrical harmony through the built-up impasto of his fluid palette knife.

With Nature Morte à la Carafe, de Staël arrives at the fault line between figurative and abstract modes of painting, tantalisingly hinting at the fundamental three dimensional forms of the arranged objects while simultaneously engaging a more independent aesthetic related to the surface of the picture plane. 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. At the height of his recognition, however, de Staël turned his back on the geometric style of abstract painting which he had pioneered so successfully, and in the early 1950s re-embraced figurative subject matter. However, his extensive apprenticeship in abstraction invests his late work with a distinctive artistic originality. Indeed, despite being created over half a century ago, works such as Nature Morte à la Carafe find strong resonance among contemporary paintings created today by the likes of Peter Doig, Sean Scully, Luc Tuymans and Frank Auerbach in the virtuoso handling of paint and the line negotiated between the figurative and the abstract.

Balanced between pictorial form and formlessness, and between material and literal three-dimensions, the present work achieves a sublime clarity of expression. The artist has developed abstract relationships of positive and negative spaces to see the forms not as representations of objects in life but as interlinked pictorial elements. Carefully breaking down what he saw into its underlying geometric forms, de Staël uses these real subjects as the stimulus for his painting, which thereafter initiates an encounter beyond mere representation. Nature Morte à la Carafe is a beautiful exemplar of de Staël's immediately recognizable output, in which the ingenuity and turmoil of his poetic vision are powerfully resolved. Within this composition of superlative balance, freshness and fluidity, de Staël achieves the harmonious tension and ambiguity that he obsessively sought throughout his career.