NICOLAS DE STAEL (1914 – 1955)
Guy Dumur’s artist monograph on Nicolas de Stael (G Dumur. De
Stael. Crown. 1975. ISBN 0-517-52611-5) http://www.amazon.com/Nicolas-Stael-Q-L-P-Art-Series/dp/0517526115 introduces the artist, sets out the course
of his life and work, and reflects on his legacy.
A French painter
De Stael fled
Russia with his parents at the age of 3 in 1918, and by the time he was 8 he
was an orphan and adopted child of Russian émigrés in Belgium. De Stael’s father had been an army officer
and was the Governor of the Fortress of St.Peter & St.Paul at
St.Petersburg.
As an adult
and as a painter de Stael understood himself to be in the tradition and culture
of France. It was in 1944/45 that de
Stael’s style evolved into abstraction: de Stael was living in Nice under the
Nazi occupation. Dumur writes that in
spite of the Cubist experience, the abstract trend in painting had not really
caught on in France and that with the Nazi occupation things ‘became better and
at the same time worse’. Modernist
painters had been condemned by the occupying power and some had been able to
make their way to the USA. Those that remained
were ready to learn anew the tradition that the Nazis sought to extinguish. A school of semi-figurative colourists was
developing in Paris: Dumur concludes that ‘at the time that de Stael really
began to paint – that is 1942 – many painters of his generation had already
seen that the evolution of painting was bound to pass through
Abstractionism’.
An ontological artist wrestling with the
angel
Dumur
searches for the source of de Stael’s vocation.
He was ‘always too much the painter to be suspicious of the universe of
words’. ‘He seems to have hungered for
all that life could immediately offer him, and what could be more powerful than
the images offered by paintings?’
Dumur argues
that de Stael’s death at his own hand in 1955 at the age of 41 is the key to
understanding his life and work. De
Stael ‘wrestled with the angel’, as other artists have done, and as some – like
de Stael - have lost their life in the process. For Dumur, de Stael is an ‘ontological
painter: one recognises his style at every moment in his short career – he
painted with his whole being’.
From figurative art to abstraction, and
back to figurative
By 1946 de
Stael’s figurative style had given way to abstraction. Dumur argues that this was a consequence of
de Stael’s association with other artists in Nice at the time: Jean Deyrolle
(cousin of his wife Jeannine), Alberto Magnelli, Sonia Delaunay and Jean Arp.
Dumur
describes de Stael’s style in 1943 as ‘one that is both precise and uncertain,
which hesitated between the freedom of the artist and the decorative concerns
which were encouraged by the innate good taste that never deserted Nicolas de
Stael’.
Two Russian
artists who ‘escorted de Stael on the way to abstraction’ were Vasily
Kandinsky, who died in 1944, and Andre Lanskoy, the latter having had the most
influence. And de Stael befriended
Georges Braque at this time, and this is considered by Dumur to be
significant.
By 1944 Dumur
describes de Stael’s style as showing an ‘equilibrium between a personality
which is looking to establish itself and the coldness of an art which must, by
definition, be impersonal’.
In 1945 de
Stael writes to a friend about his desire to ‘seize on the truth’ and to let
his paintings ‘live by conscious imperfection’.
De Stael’s
wife Jeannine died in 1946 due to complications of pregnancy, leaving de Stael
the sole parent of their daughter. De Steal
was now living in poverty and grief.
Dumus writes that de Stael ‘could only resort to movement, chance and
the void’. His paintings show
subjectivity, and they use sombre colours that ‘have their own serenity’: they
have a ‘lyric continuity that cannot be confused with ‘Tachism’, ‘Dripping’ or
the pictorial ‘acts’ of painters who
come after him ... we are still a long way from Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko,
Georges Mathieu and Jackson Pollock’.
In 1946 de
Stael’s style had changed so that Dumur describes it as ‘having moved
imperceptibly toward the glorification of pure painting’.
In 1947 de
Stael married Francoise Chapouton with whom he had a daughter and a son. By 1950 de Stael’s style is ‘fully
consolidated’. He was living and working in Paris: an abstract painter
‘entirely free from the exterior world’.
He had exhibitions in New York, Paris and London.
In the early
1950s de Stael moved back to the South of France and his works gradually became
more figurative in style: landscapes and still life. In
1950 he had written to a friend: ‘Always there is a subject, always’. Dumus writes: ‘It could be that just when one
thinks that Nicolas de Stael is turning his back on Abstractionism he plunges
in deeper, that his painting becomes more mysterious’.
From about 1952 onwards de Stael’s works became
‘an act of humility toward the sources of inspiration which up until then he
would only allow as being in himself’.
Dumus suggest
that it was only at this time that de Stael achieved absolute originality. He now wanted to go beyond the established
understanding of abstraction and develop his own style: ‘the return to the subject was still a way to
carry on the struggle with the angel’.
In late 1954
de Stael wrote to a friend describing the ‘sublime fragility’ of his works,
despite their outward appearance of ‘violence and perpetual forces at play’,
and he described the ‘atrocious feeling of vertigo’ that he suffered as he
painted his large works. He felt that
too great a portion of his work as a painter was chance – a stroke of luck.
Nicolas de
Stael died on 16th March 1955.
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