Between Abstraction and Figuration

Nicolas de Staël at the Musée d’Art Moderne

Today I want to tell you about the exhibition I mentioned a few weeks ago. The retrospective on the artist Nicolas de Staël at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Retrospectives can be tricky. A viewer can easily become visually fatigued. What saved the Joan Mitchel retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton last year was the juxtaposition of Claude Monet’s paintings with hers. By the end of the exhibition, my appreciation for Monet’s work had grown. At the Alice Neel retrospective at the Pompidou last year, portraits of different people whose different personalities were captured by Neel made for a fascinating and varied exhibition.

Two exhibitions, right after the pandemic, the Cherry Blossoms series by Damien Hirst and the landscape panoramas of his home in Normandy by David Hockney, were completely, utterly joyful. I was not sated, I was not full. I could have contentedly continued looking at both for much, much longer.

And so it was with this exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Staël. (Fig. 1) I fell in love with his paintings and drawings and sketches. (Figs. 2, 3, 4) Before I knew it, three hours had flown by and there was still so much more I wanted to see, to see again. Each room of the exhibition elicited real visual, real visceral pleasure. De Staël’s use of line and color and pattern was a gift to the eye and the mind. He worked at a time when many artists were jumping onto the abstract-only train, abandoning all references to the ‘real world’. Even in de Staël’s most abstract paintings, there are links to figures, to landscapes, to things seen and experienced.

***Figure 1. Nicolas de Staël in his studio***

He said this about abstraction, about figuration, “the painter will always need to have before their eyes, whether near or far, the moving source of inspiration that is the sensory world.” And this, “I do not set abstract painting as an opposition to figuration. A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space.” That is perfectly clear, it makes perfect sense.

I don’t know whether the MAM curators who put together the Nicolas de Staël retrospective knew that the curators at the Fondation Louis Vuitton were simultaneously putting together a retrospective on Mark Rothko’s paintings. I didn’t get to see the Rothko show before I left Paris, it will still be there when I get back. But I am afraid that, as other people have remarked, there are only so many Rothkos you can look at any one time. (Fig. 5) Eventually, no matter how beautiful the canvases may be individually, they do not improve when so many are seen together, at the same time.

Which is not the case with paintings by de Staël because his are so varied and so vibrant. Here is an interesting tidbit. Chaim Soutine (b. 1893) and Nicolas de Staël (b. 1914) went to Paris to fulfill their dream of becoming an artist. Mark Rothko (b. 1903), like Willem de Kooning, (b. 1904) chose New York City. De Kooning explained it this way, “Painters flocked to Paris, while ‘a modern person’ was attracted to America”.

De Staël committed suicide when he was 41 years old. It wasn’t because he was failing as an artist. Indeed, from his mid-30s on, his paintings were sought by collectors and gallerists in Europe and America. And yet, since his death, when people talk about de Staël, it is his sudden and tragic end that takes center stage.

The curators’ stated aim with this exhibition was to forget the ‘de Staël myth” and put art back into the center of the artist’s story. They have selected 200 paintings, drawings, engravings and notebooks. Many of the works are from private collections, many have never been seen in public before. According to the curators, “This exhibition is to show what a great, original and atypical painter de Staël was.”

Nicolaï Vladimirovitch Staël von Holstein was born in Tsarist Russia. (Fig. 6) The first few years of his life were idyllic, spent at the “….magnificent Peter and Paul Fortress, where his father, Baron Vladimir Ivanovitch de Staël-Holstein was the Vice Governor.” When he was 2, Nicolaï became a page at the imperial court. That privileged life came to a crashing halt with the Russian Revolution. The de Staël family first escaped to a property they owned in Estonia. Then they emigrated to Poland, where, by 1922, both of his parents were dead (Spanish flu?). Orphaned at age 8, Nicolas and his two sisters were sent to live with a Russian couple in Brussels. (Fig. 7)

***Figure 6. Nicolas de Staël with his mother and one of his sisters, 1915***

***Figure 7. Nicolas de Staël (4th from right) with other Russian foster children, 1924***

After a Jesuit education during which he learned to fence, swim and play tennis, he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels where he studied drawing and painting. Then the Académie Saint-Gilles, also in Brussels, where he studied architecture and decoration.

During his student years, he developed a passion for travel. He wrote, “I know that my life will be a continual voyage on an uncertain sea, all the more reason for me to build a solid boat.” He visited Holland where he admired the work of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals. In Paris and Provence, he studied Cézanne, Matisse, Soutine and Braque. On a bicycle trip with a friend to Spain when he was 20, (summer 1934) he discovered El Greco.

In 1936, de Staël traveled to Morocco, spurred by a desire to follow in the footsteps of Delacroix, to draw and paint what Delacroix had seen and painted. He stayed for more than a year, traveling from Fes to Rabat to Casablanca to Marrakech. It was there, in August 1937 that de Staël met Jeannine Guillou, (Fig. 8) an artist with a husband and young son. De Staël convinced Jeannine to leave her husband and travel to Algers and Italy with him. She agreed and brought her young son with her.

***Figure 8. Jeannine holding daughter, 1941***

This exhibition includes de Staël’s drawing and an oil painting of Jeannine, her thin face could have been painted by El Greco. (Figs. 9, 10) When their money ran out, they returned to France, initially to Jeannine’s parents home, then to Paris.

De Staël joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939. He was demobilized after a few months. He joined Jeannine, who by that time had moved to Nice. When they returned to Paris in 1943, they had a second child with them, their own daughter, Anne. The war years were ones of extreme poverty for them, as they were for so many. One time they were so cold, they burned what furniture they could spare for heat. Their modest income was from paintings Jeannine was able to sell. In 1946, she died at hospital during a therapeutic abortion, her body too weak to continue.

With his wife dead, his career picking up, and two young children to take care of, it is no wonder that de Staël remarried quickly, just 3 months after Jeannine’s death.

Soon he could afford a large studio in Paris. He worked on several canvases at the same time, moving from oil to India ink; from canvas to paper. (Figs. 11, 12)

The year 1951 was a good year for de Staël. An American art dealer held a major exhibition of de Staël’s work in his New York gallery. The Musée d’Art Moderne bought his Composition en gris et vert. (Fig. 13) De Staël and the poet René Char became friends and created a book of Char’s poetry and de Staël’s prints. (Fig. 14)

***Figure 13. Composition in Gray and Green, 1949***

In 1952, de Staël attended, for the first time, a nighttime soccer match between France and Sweden at the Parc des Princes. The movement of the players enthralled him. When he got to his studio, he began working on what finally became a total of 26 paintings inspired by the match. The paintings have been hailed, according to one critic, “for marking a significant moment in de Staël’s creative evolution, achieving a ‘synthesis between the abstract and the figurative,’ (Pierre Martin-Vivier, Director of 20th-Century Art, Christie’s Paris). The final painting, called Parc des Princes (Fig. 15, 1952), captures a real sense of movement. Rectangular shapes, in blues and reds, blocks of black and white, touches of yellow, become soccer players in motion. (Fig. 16) About the game itself, de Staël wrote to René Char, “Between sky and earth, on grass that is either red or blue, there whirls a ton of muscle in complete disregard for self…What joy! René, what joy!” The same can be said of his paintings.

In his 30s, de Staël worked intensely and profitably. And he never stopped traveling. He kept his studio in Paris but spent most of his final years, his late 30s, in the south of France and Italy. In 1953, personal history repeated itself, de Staël met and fell in love with a married woman, Jeanne Polge. (Fig. 17) In quick order, he learned how to drive and bought a used van. Then, with Jeanne, his pregnant wife and children (3 of them by then), he drove to Italy, heading for Sicily.

***Figure 17. Jeanne Pole & Nicolas de Staël***

Critics have suggested that de Staël’s change of technique and color at this time wasn’t just because of where he was painting, but in whose company he was painting, aka Jeanne Polge. He abandoned the heavy impasto and subtle colors of earlier years and replaced them with diluted pigments in brilliant shades. (Figs. 18, 19)

De Staël wrote, “I am in a constant fog, not knowing where to go, what to do…eating these landscapes all day long to the point of nausea…” That comment resonates for me since I have written that overindulging on art (rather than patisseries) never makes me sick. Must be different for an artist, this artist anyhow.

Looking at landscapes, deciding which ones and from what perspective, what angle, to paint. De Staël’s paintings of Agrigento, for example, are filled with dazzling colors in surprising juxtapositions. The canvases are intense. There’s a strong sense of Sicily’s blazing sun.(Figs. 20, 21, 22). His drawings, like all his drawings, show a steady and sure hand. With a few strokes he is able to capture boats on a dock, trees in a forest, birds overhead (Figs 23, 24)

And then, in the midst of creating these visual feasts, de Staël jumped from the eleventh-floor terrace of his studio in Antibes. But why? At the time of his suicide, his paintings were sought by both American and French collectors. He had a successful show in New York at the Knoedler Gallery in 1953 and another at Paul Rosenberg’s New York gallery in 1954. But all was not well, during a brief visit to Paris shortly before his death, de Staël told a friend: “I am lost … perhaps I have painted enough.” In his last letter to his dealer Jacques Dubourg, he wrote that he didn’t have the strength to continue.

Gustave de Staël, the youngest of the artist’s four children (with whom his wife was pregnant during that fateful road trip), who was only a year old when his father died, is sure that his father’s suicide was “a spur of the moment act”. Repeating what his mother always told him, if someone had been there, his father never would have ended his life. “If you look at his last works they are full of life. I don’t see sadness or melancholy in them.” But nobody was there.

Maybe he was just exhausted - he had painted 700 paintings in just a few years. Maybe his suicide was not connected to his art at all. Maybe it was the act of a desperate lover. The woman with whom he had fallen madly in love, with whom he had become completely obsessed, for whom he had deserted his family, wasn’t willing to do the same for him. For Jeanne, de Staël’s passion was “smothering.” Maybe he jumped off the building because she had returned to her husband. Unrequited love.

As a critic reviewing de Staël’s published letters writes, the artist was a mass of contradictions. Which might be expected, given his beginnings and all of the changes and losses he experienced during his brief lifetime. He was “highly strung (and) aristocratic,” “boyish and vulnerable.” He was forever “oscillating between abstract and figurative, between Paris and the South of France, between the need for family life and the need for movement (and) solitude.” (Fig. 25)

Although his suicide might not have been anticipated, he did not act in haste. According to another critic, “He put his affairs in order, he wrote a note to his daughter Anne, confirming her share in his estate.” And then he swallowed a bottle of barbiturates. Too impatient to wait for them to work, “he climbed onto the roof of his studio and flung himself onto the corniche below.”

Ah, but what survives! (Figs. 26, 27, 28)