Art Sunday; Nicolas de Stael

Nicolas de Staël
(1914-1955)

Nicolas de Staël
January 5, 1914, Saint Petersburg – March 16, 1955, Antibes (French nationality, of Russian origin) was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting.
He was a major painter of the School of Paris.
He was the son of a wealthy Russian baron and it was his mother who encouraged him to draw and paint from a very early age. His early life was difficult which ciould have led to his mental health problems later in life. In 1919 the Russian Revolution forced his family into exile, they travelled to Poland and settled there. Unfortunately within 2 years both parents were dead and Nicolas was sent to Brussels to study humanities. It was in 1932 that he entered the Royal Academy of Art there.

During the 1930s Staël seemed a restless soul, he travelled extensively and looked at as many kinds of art as possible. In the Netherlands he was particularly impressed by the works of Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer, and in Paris he was very moved by the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. His work is heavily influenced by Matisse in particular. He traveled throughout Spain, Italy, Morocco, and Algeria and then settled in 1938 settled in Paris. At the start of WW2 Staël joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in Tunisia for a year.
In 1942 Staël's individual style began to emerge. He gave up direct representation for a highly sensuous, nonfigurative approach, as in his Composition 45 (1945). He became friends with Braque and André Lanskoy, whose work he greatly admired and who encouraged and advised him. Staël's life had been one of extreme poverty, but by 1948, when he became a French citizen, he was beginning to be successful. Although he was painting nonfigurative pictures, he did not consider himself an abstract painter. "One does not start from nothing, and a painting is always bad if it has not been preceded by contact with nature."
In 1951 Staël made a trip to London, where he became familiar with the work of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable (the influence of Turner can also bee seen in his work) That year he executed a series of paintings of football players.

He began to paint directly from nature and developed a highly personal style of landscape painting. Staël applied brilliant flat colors with a minimum of detail, he captured the essence of the scene; this recognizable  simplification of a  scene was one of his trade mark and his contribution to the development of ‘modern painting’. It is found especially in paintings such as  in Landscape, Sky, Blue and Gray (1953).

He was a dedicated artist who lived for his painting, he had achieved wealth and fame when, on March 16, 1955, he committed suicide in Antibes.

But by 1953, de Staël's redcurrant depression had led him to seek isolation in the south of France (eventually in Antibes).

He suffered from exhaustion, insomnia and depression. Following a meeting with a particularly critical and unsympathetic art critic, on March 16, 1955 he committed suicide. He leapt to his death from his eleventh story studio terrace, in Antibes. He was only 41 years old.