Nicolas de Staël

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Nicolas de Staël
Born
Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein

(1914-01-05)5 January 1914
Saint Petersburg
Died16 March 1955(1955-03-16) (aged 41)
Antibes, France
Known forPainting, Drawing
SpouseFrançoise Chapouton
PartnerJeannine Guillou

Nicolas de Staël (French:

Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting
. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles.

Early life

Nicolas de Staël was born Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein (

Russian Revolution; both his father and stepmother died in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Staël was sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922).[2]

Career beginnings

He eventually studied decoration and design at the Brussels

Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and architecture at the Académie de St Gilles (1932). In the 1930s, he traveled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941–1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine-style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels.[3] He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941. Sometime in 1940 he met one of his future dealers, Jeanne Bucher.[3]

During the War

In 1941, he moved to Nice where he met Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay, and these artists would inspire his first abstract paintings, or "Compositions". In 1942, Jeannine and Nicolas de Staël's daughter Anne was born. The growing family also included Jeannine's nine-year-old son Antoine.[3] In 1943 (during the Nazi occupation), de Staël returned to Paris with Jeannine, but the war years were extremely difficult. During the war his paintings were included in several group exhibitions and in 1944 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie l'Esquisse. In April 1945, he had a one-man exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher and in May 1945 his paintings were included in the first Salon de Mai.[3] De Staël's work was also included in the Salon d'Automne that year.[4] In Paris in 1944, he met and befriended Georges Braque, and by 1945 his exhibitions brought him critical fame. However times were difficult, and successes came too late, since Jeannine died in February 1946 from illness brought on by malnutrition.[5]

Professional success

De Staël met Françoise Chapouton in the spring of 1946, and they married in May. In October 1946 thanks to his friendship with artist

Phillips Collection. He had considerable success in the United States, and England in the early 1950s. In 1950 Leo Castelli organized a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City that included him.[6] In 1952, he had one-man exhibitions in London, Montevideo, and in Paris.[9]
In March 1953, he had his first official one-man exhibition at M. Knoedler & Co. in New York City. The show was both a commercial and critical success. In 1953 he had an exhibition at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC, (known today as The
Merion, Pennsylvania and various other important institutions.[7]

After returning to Paris, de Staël met visiting New York art dealer

Cubist
painters whom Nicolas de Staël admired. By the end of 1953 the demand for de Staël's paintings was so great that Paul Rosenberg raised his prices and continually requested more paintings. The demand was so high for his planned spring 1954 exhibition, that Rosenberg requested an additional fifteen paintings. Once again this exhibition was both commercially and critically successful. In April 1954 de Staël's fourth child Gustave was born. In that spring he had a successful exhibition in Paris at Jacques Dubourg's gallery. His new paintings marked his departure from abstraction and a return to figuration, still-life and landscape.

In the fall of 1954, he moved with his family to Antibes.

Death

Left-side view
Front-side view
Right-side view
The house in Antibes in which Staël died. There are two plaques on both sides of the main front door which are written in both Russian and French. Translated into English they say: "The painter Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955) lived in this house where he died on 16 March 1955"

By 1953, de Staël's state led him to seek isolation in the south of France (eventually in Antibes). He suffered from exhaustion, insomnia and

depression. On 16 March 1955, in the wake of a disappointing meeting with disparaging art critic Douglas Cooper,[10] de Staël leapt to his death from his eleventh story studio terrace, in Antibes. He was 41 years old.[11][12]

Nicolas de Staël is buried at the Montrouge Cemetery.

Legacy

De Staël's painting career spans roughly 15 years (from 1940) and produced more than a thousand paintings. His work shows the influence of

Abstract Expressionist movement, and French Tachisme
, but which he developed independently of them. Typically his paintings contained block-like slabs of colour, emerging as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image. Accordingly, when a Rothko painting was paired with one by Nicolas de Staël in the show of young French and American painters, Rothko commented to William Seitz (in 1952): "Blobs vs. blocks. They both begin with ‘b.‘ Comparisons are false!"".[13] In fact, according to de Staël himself, he turned to his "abstracting" because he "found it awkward to paint an object as a likeness because of the awkwardness I felt when faced[!] with the infinite multitude of coexisting objects in any single object".[14]

His grave

De Staël's work was quickly recognized within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. However, he moved away from abstraction in his later paintings, seeking a more "French" lyrical style, returning to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) at the end of his life. His return to imagery during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. His painting style is characterized by a thick impasto showing traces of the brush and the palette knife, and by a division of the canvas into numerous zones of color (especially blues, reds and whites). His most well-known late paintings of beaches and landscapes are dominated by the sky and effects of light.[15]

Much of de Staël's late work—in particular his thinned and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s—predicts

Pop Art
of the 1960s.

The French New Wave filmmaker

Pierrot Le Fou
was strongly influenced by de Staël's work.

De Staël's 1955 painting Le Fort d'Antibes was used as the cover for the Moody Blues' 1988 album Sur la Mer.[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ In France, Staël is pronounced [stal]. In Switzerland, it is also pronounced [stɛl]. It is never pronounced [sta.ɛl].
  2. ISBN 1884446000
    .
  3. ^ a b c d Chronology: Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 p.96
  4. ^ Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London, 1961, p. 21
  5. ^ Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London, 1961, pp. 23–24
  6. ^ a b Chronology: Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 pp.96–97
  7. ^ a b Chronology: Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 p.98
  8. ^ Eliza Rathbone, Introduction: Nicolas de Staël, 1914–1955, Exhibition Catalogue, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 p.6
  9. ^ Chronology: Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 p.97–98
  10. ^ Richardson, J.(2001) The Sorcerers Apprentice, London: Pimlico p195
  11. ^ Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London, 1961, p.6
  12. ^ Chronology: Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997 p.99
  13. ^ James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko. A Biography. Chicago, 1993: p. 621
  14. ^ Dario Gamboni, Potential Images. Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art. 2002, New Haven, p.19
  15. ^ Landscape Study, Tate
  16. ^ "The Moody Blues Frequently Asked Questions List".

Sources

  • Exhibition Catalogue, Nicolas de Staël, paintings 1950–1955, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC. 1997,
    ISBN 0-9660769-1-5
    .
  • Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London, 1961.
  • Lefevre Fine Art, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, "Works on Paper" Nicolas de Staël, "Sans Titre", page 60

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nicolas de Staël.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_de_Staël&oldid=1217809013"