Nicolas de Staël, Marine, 1954

06 November 2024

Celebrated French painter Nicolas de Staël left an indelible mark on the art world with his distinct style, characterised by richly textured oil paint applied with a palette knife. The artist is known for the immediacy and emotion that he painted with during his celebrated, short and frenetic career.

Veering between abstraction and figuration, he used thickly-applied oil paint to break his subjects down to their most basic constituent parts. In these images, he sought to represent a more essential reality than that contained in the outward appearance of the world. In his 15 years of painting, his style steadily evolved to render his subjects — which ranged from landscapes to architecture and still lives — in an ever more elementary and unembellished way.

In the bottom left corner of Marine (1954) is a streak of crimson red, the hull of a small sailboat that floats on an ocean of white, presided over by mountains and sky painted in two equally vivid shades of blue. It might depict a view from the French Channel Coast, or somewhere in Spain — both places the artist visited in the year that it was painted — or from his home of Antibes. To de Staël, though, such information would be secondary. A painting is less about its subject than the distinct, wordless impression that it leaves, or, as he once put it, “the blow that strikes you”^[1].

After de Staël’s untimely death, the year after he painted Marine, critic Douglas Cooper explained that he “knew just what he wanted to convey with paint, and what is more had a compelling vision of how he intended to do so”^[2]. During and following the artist’s lifetime, this vision was recognised by critics, dealers, collectors and other practitioners in all corners.

For example, de Staël was French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard’s favourite painter. His use of intense colours like the red, white and blue of paintings like Marine directly influenced his use of the same colours in his 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. At the time, a member of the film’s crew commented clothes “For Pierrot Le Fou Godard decided to shoot in Porquerolles because of its light, of its whiteness. There, the whites, the blues, the reds are more intense”^[3]. He also captured the imaginations of famed dealers Leo Castelli in New York and Paul Rosenberg in Paris, the latter of whom represented him — alongside Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse — from 1953.

For his part, Castelli was also instrumental in the artist’s success. In 1950, he included a then 36-year-old de Staël  in an exhibition he organised for Sidney Janis Gallery in New York entitled ‘Young Painters in The US and France’. Poignantly, de Staël’s work was hung next to a Mark Rothko painting. Working on different sides of the Atlantic, the parallels between the two artists are undeniable: their immediacy, devotion and ability to push painting beyond straightforward representation and towards a more elusive truth. Years later Marie du Bouchet, de Staël’s granddaughter and biographer, commented “the two artists do share a sort of coloured vibration”^[4]. This exposure to an American audience was well received; by 1951 his work Painting (1947) had been acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

At a time when Abstract Expressionism was making household names of artists in America, European painters who pushed against the same boundaries as their risked being sidelined. De Staël escaped this treatment, thanks partly to his unique artistic vision and partly to his well-placed dealers and buyers across the ocean. Today, many painters attempt to paint with de Staël's dauntless clarity - as he put it, with “an eye that rams”^[5]- to varying degrees of success. In light of this, his work has come to be understood as truly pioneering, his major 2023 retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris crystallising him as one of the most important voices in painting of the 20th Century.