Sunday, 3 August 2014

NICOLAS DE STAEL (1914 – 1955)


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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