Nicolas de Staël

See also: Staël

Nicolas de Staël (baron Nicolaï Vladimirovitch Staël von Holstein) , born the January 5th 1914 with Saint-Pétersbourg, dead the March 16th 1955 with Antibes, was a painter of which the method brings it closer to a sculptor, where even the black was light, and the single texture of its fabrics explored new tension fields.

Biography

The father of Nicolas de Staël was vice-governor of the Pierre fortress and Paul with St-Pétersbourg until 1917. Its family is forced with the exile in 1919 in Poland after the revolution. His/her parents die there. Orphan, Nicolas de Staël is entrusted by his godmother to a family of Brussels, Fricero, in 1922. He studies with the royal Academy of the Art schools of the Town of Brussels, and, in the course of the evening, with the Academy of the Art schools of the Commune of Saint-Gilles-lez-Brussels. In the years 1930, he travels through Europe, lives in Paris 1934 and Morocco 1936 (where he meets his partner, the painter Jeannine Guillou, who appears in his paintings of 1941 and 1942). He joined the Foreign legion in 1939 and is demobilized in 1941.

He lives then with Nice where he meets Alberto Magnelli, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay which inspires his first abstract paintings, the Compositions . In 1943 (under the occupation Nazi), De Staël goes back to Paris with Jeannine; these years of war are very difficult (Jeannine dies in 1946). It meets Braque then and a first exposure in 1944 with Kandinsky and Magnelli attracts on him criticism. He is a great success with the the United States and in England with the beginning of the year 1950 but in 1953 a depression isolates it in the south from France then with Antibes), where he commits suicide by throwing window of his workshop in 1955.

The career of Staël is spread out over 15 years as from 1940 and more than thousand works, influenced by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Fernand Leger and Chaim Soutine, as well as by the Flemish Masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers.

From 1942, of Staël breaks with the Peinture traditional, figurative, for a radical abstraction. During ten years, he works an overfed oil paste, weighing down it or reducing it, using knives, of trowels or even of hawks with mortar ( Grand Park of the Princes , 1952). These thicknesses and these opalescences are sometimes gathered, like elements of the composition, in only one fabric ( Ciel in Honfleur , 1952).

After having seen the France-Sweden match with the park of the Princes in 1952, it paints the series of the Footballers.

Then it returns to the fluidity of the brush, the dilution of the oil spread out with cotton or the gauze, and the matter of its fabrics, of broken and rough, is done increasingly light, impalpable. It dissolves as in its ultimate fabric, the Concert .

Works

  • Of the Dance , 1946, (Center Pompidou)
  • Mole , 1946-1947
  • the Hard life , (1946, (Center Pompidou)
  • the roofs , 1952, (Center Pompidou)
  • Lavandou , 1952, (Center Pompidou)
  • the Footballers (series), Large Park of the Princes… 1952
  • the orchestra , 1953, (Center Pompidou)
  • musicians, memory of Sidney Bechet 1953 , (Center Pompidou)
  • Agrigente , 1953, Zurich, Kunsthaus
  • the Tower Eiffel , 1954, Troyes, museum of Modern art
  • Agrigente , 1954, particular collection
  • the Cathedral , 1954, Lyon, museum of the Art schools
  • Sicily , 1954, Grenoble, museum of the Art schools
  • the Concert (the great concert) , 1955 Antibes, Museum Picasso
  • Corner of workshop , blue bottom, 1955, particular collection

note: to also see (more than thousand tables) different the abstracted composition, naked, died natures, joinings, drawings in the museums and the particular collections .

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