Nicolas de Staël Retrospective at Musée d'Art Moderne

Arbre rouge (Red Tree) Provence 1953 Private Collection

Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) said that "all his life he needed to think painting, to see canvases, and paint in order to help him live." This major retrospective is the first in France since the one at the Pompidou Centre in 2003. It follows the development of the artist's particular 'block-like' style, thanks to 200 paintings, drawings and note-books from public and private collections in  the U.S. and Europe. 

The single red tree may be contrasted with his clump of blue trees below from the same year:

Arbres (Trees) Provence 1953 Private Collection

The above works are from de Staël's latter period, when his style takes on a lyricism somewhere in between figuration and abstraction. His experiments led him on a quest for intensity, using at times thick over-layers of paint and he often used a spatula....like a plasterer or builder?

Le Mur, Composition (The wall, Composition) Paris 1951 Private Collection, Switzerland 

Occasionally the underlying colour peeks through the overlay. De Staël sometimes fragments and sometimes composes, using coloured shapes, as in a child's building game.

His earlier compositions look almost totally abstract:

Composition, Paris, 1946  Pen and Chinese ink on paper  Private Collection

A previous work, also entitled 'Composition', has a similar rhythm to Kandinsky?:

Composition Nice, 1942 pastel on paper

Other works take on rather more recognisable forms, helped by the titles- for example the one below: 'Dancing':

De la Danse (Dancing) Paris, 1946/7 Pompidou Centre

                                                                             

Nicolas de Staël developed his own style independently, but was influenced no doubt by artists he saw in Paris and Nice (for example Jean Arp and the Delaunays). He was a great friend of Georges Braque. They were neighbours when he lived in rue Gauguet, near the Montsouris park in South East Paris. Just as Braque the Cubist progressed from analytical brown and grey forms to synthesised images using more colour and figurative shapes, then took on a lyricism, so did de Staël.

One of de Staël's more identifiable works shows a view of Paris by night:

Le Pont des Arts la nuit (The Pont des Arts at night) Paris, 1954 Private Collection

This wonderfully evocative painting depicts a grey river Seine and the Arts bridge with the towers of Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle steeple rising luminously above them like an apparition.

The exhibition includes a few of the rare examples of de Staël's early figurative work:

Pont de Bercy (Bercy Bridge) Paris, 1939  Private Collection

Painted when he was 25 years old, this landscape contains the elements that remained all his life important to de Staël- the fluidity of the water, the rhythm of the bridge structure and his awareness of the light and space.

A sketch from the same year of his first companion Jeanne Guillou, whom he met in Morocco, shows his strength and skill in drawing:

Etude, Visage de femme (Study, Face of a woman) ca 1939  Charcoal on paper
Private Collection

Jeanne's expression appears melancholic. She gave birth to Nicolas's daughter Anne, but later died in Paris during the terrible period of the German Occupation in World War 2, from the effects of malnutrition.

Nicolas de Staël in his studio rue Gauguet, Paris summer 1954
photograph by Denise Colomb

Nicolas married Françoise Chapouton one year later, in 1946, and they went on to have three more children.

Nicolas de Stael's life was a journey starting in St Petersburg. The family went into exile in Poland after the Russian Revolution. In 1922 Nicolas travelled to Brussels, where he and his elder sister Marina lived with a Russian family, their own parents having died by that time.  Later he moved to Paris, then Nice and the Vaucluse in the South of France, punctuated by visits to Morocco, Algeria and Sicily. Lastly he lived in a studio in Antibes, facing the sea, where he threw himself from the balcony, aged only 41. He was suffering from exhaustion, insomnia and depression. He left a note for his art dealer saying that he didn't have the strength to finish the works he left in his studio. 

A magnificent example of a work he didn't quite finish is the scene showing a piano, music scores and cello which condense a musical experience:

Le Concert,  Antibes, 1955   Picasso Museum, Antibes

The biggest painting he ever undertook, 'The Concert' seems to contain the emotion he had recently experienced at the Marigny theatre in Paris listening to Webern and Schönberg, only ten days before he ended his life. It is on permanent display in Antibes, a short distance away from his last studio on the ramparts.

The sketches de Staël made on his visit to Sicily in 1953, demonstrate his method of working:

He didn't have the time or the materials to paint on the spot so he created his painting later:

Temple sicilien (Sicilian temple) Lagnes, 1953  Private Collection

Similarly, his charcoal sketch of a nude model picks out the minimal lines of his subject:

Etude de nu (Study of a nude) Antibes, 1955  Private Collection

His painting of a nude transforms her into a landscape, using areas of strong colour:

Nu couché bleu (Blue reclining nude)  Antibes, 1955  Private Collection

His model was a woman he had met in Provence, Jeanne Polge, with whom he had a passionate but impossible love affair.

In de Staël's work, the structure is always of prime importance. His youthful artistic studies in Belgium included architectural training. In his late paintings, the space and light become equally important. De Staël's career spanned a mere 16 years, in which he produced about a thousand paintings.

His emotions in the North of France, in Calais, are condensed into a minimalist view of the beach:

Calais, 1954  Private Collection

How different is the impression he gives of Southern climes, with their bright  Mediterranean colours:

Marseille,  Ménerbes. 1954 Courtesy Catherine & Nicolas Kairis/
Courtesy Applicat-Prazan, Paris

Marseille,  Ménerbes, 1954  Los Angeles County Museum of Art

De Stael's bright colours inspired French film director Jean Luc Godard and perhaps the Pop artists of the fifties and sixties. This is the striking landscape used for the Exhibition poster:

Agrigente (Agrigento)  Menerbes, 1954  Private Collection/ courtesy Applicat-Prazan

Several famous ionic works are included in the exhibition, for example his football match and the  evocative painting of an orchestra which has a permanent place in the Pompidou Centre:

L'Orchestre (The orchestra) Paris, 1953  Pompidou Centre

On loan from Colmar is the portrait of his first child Anne:

Portrait of Anne  Lagnes, 1953 Musee Unterlinden, Colmar

A painting with a similar feel, but with an impression of movement is the one depicting Rameau's opera-ballet:

Les Indes galantes  Paris, 1953  Private Collection

 De Staël often found inspiration in concerts and ballets.

A section of the exhibition shows some brilliant floral bouquets and still lifes which have undergone the de Staël treatment, transforming our vision of a commonplace object like a salad bowl:

Le Saladier (The Salad Bowl)  Antibes, 1954  Private Collection

Deux vases de fleurs (Two vases of flowers) Lagnes, 1953 Private Collection, Switzerland

Fleurs (Flowers)  Paris, 1952  Private Collection

The observer is free to recreate the subject in his own mind. For example, what does the painting below, called 'Landscape', suggest?

Paysage sur fond rose (Landscape on pink background) Ménerbes, 1954 Private Collection

The title states 'Landscape', but in fact the artist has turned a composition with three boats upside down in order to free the shapes...  This chimes with a revelation Kandinsky experienced when he observed one of his paintings sideways and felt a certain liberation. Embarrassing perhaps to stand on one's head in an art gallery, but personally, I quite like the original positioning...

My review ends with one of his late, lyrical, figurative works- the Seagulls:

Les Mouettes (The Seagulls)  Antibes, 1955  Private Collection

Nicolas de Staël Retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne,  

11 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris

métro: Iéna

then from 15th Sept 2023 to 21st January 2024 

 Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne 

from 9th Feb  to 9th June, 2024  

*********************