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Lot Essay
It has recently been rare to see important works by Nicolas de Staël appear on the market. His very short career of ten years, his small output and, above all, the increasing appreciation of his importance historically as well as aesthetically have driven collectors to keep hold of their prized possessions. The presentation of Ciel at auction is therefore a true event.
The general circumstances of Nicolas de Staël's short life are now well known, from his birth in Saint Petersburg in 1914 to his death in Antibes in 1955. An early vocation enticed the young Russian refugee in Brussels to seek a high quality academic training in the arts. His impatience helped him quicky recognise the limits of a classical approach. His spirit of adventure pushed him to search in museums, alongside recognised masters, for models of freedom. Their example guided him while he refined his own formation during solitarty voyages. It was in Morocco that he had the luck of meeting the painter Jeannine Guillou, whose maturity helped tame, during their few years together, the young artist's exuberance. The urgency to live, the urgency to create, and the urgency to learn dominated this figure whose stature was impressive not only intellectually but also physically.
In Nice, having encountered various artists engaged in the field of abstraction, such as Magnelli, Delaunay and Arp, he discovered a new area of experimentation, which he cultivated by dealing directly with the technical problems of medium and structure as well as the drive of his own creative instinct.
Back in Paris, de Staël's hard work started showing a glimpse of his personal style, first heavy with a dramatic atmosphere and the material treated with thick strokes, then slowly evolving towards an affirmation of a more and more subtle relationship between light and space. Always at the extreme of powerful sensations, a too stringent aesthetic environment drove him to look for more freedom in a stronger confrontation between nature and reality. He suddenly revolted against a budding abstract academia and created a scandal at the Salon de Mai with his monumental Park des Princes in 1952. This event was the breaking point with those who viewed him as a leader and isolated him even further in his revolutionary views. Despite his daily economic problems, his need of expansion and grandeur made him work on a monumental scale unknown at the time, which would later be used only by his American couterparts. Measuring himself against a vast space, organising it into the rythms of energy and charging it with significance like an orchestration of measured violence now became the integral part of the purpose of his work.
He was engaged in a dialogue of a new order with reality. According to his adventurous spirit, each experience was lived to the extreme of innovation, with a view to integrating the abstract elements in the recreation of a truth that has become an aesthetic revelation on the canvas. This disposition to cultivate improbability with a view to hunting down the truth of his vision required as much rigour and lucidity as imagination. He even pursued it "sur le motif" as the classical painters put it, which was considered by the abstract painters as absolute heresy. He revelled wholly in it with, as he stated, "1) La fulgurance de l'authorité. 2) La fulgurance de l'hésitation". Nature became a constant source of propositions of structures and spaces, of rythms, breaths and lights, of harmonies and magic.
In a letter to the poet René Char, Nicholas de Staël evoked with nostalgia "la passion que j'avais enfant pour les grands ciels" above Saint Petersburg. Throughout his career, he appears to have paid particular attention to the sky, be it that of nature and that shown by Turner, Lorrain, El Greco or Corot.
In many outdoor studies in Nantes, Chevreuses, Gentilly or later above the beaches of the North Sea or the Mediterranean, the sky always played an important role in the composition: sometimes as a wall, sometimes fluid and deep. One should recall the definition the painter gave, which conditioned his entire evolution: "L'espace pictural est un mur, mais tous les oiseaux du monde y volent librement. A toute profondeur."
Starting in 1952, the large composition from the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM), Les toits, which earlier had the title Ciel de Dieppe, underlines the successful synthesis between abstraction and reality. Year after year, a large number of landscapes evoked the presence of the sky: Ciel à Nantes, Ciel à Honfleur, Mer et nuages, Ciel gris bleu and, in 1954, Ciel et mer. Nearly all of them are marked by an atmospheric feel, animated by the playfulness of the clouds.
In other paintings, particularly those created in Sicily, the sky was treated without any link to the reality of sight. It became an abstract element of the earth-sky-man trinity, functioning as a translation of a feeling or an emotion, its texture and colour obeying only the aesthetic needs of the work, sometimes to the extent of violent oppositions of colour and form.
The calm and serene feel of the 1955 Ciel can surprise the viewer by its contrasts. It clearly belongs to another order of research or expression, to another level of conciousness.
There reigns in this exceptional work a concentration and subtlety in the expression of light, a slowness and particular care in the placing of each brush stroke, a harmony from value to value, from tone to tone, like an explored distance in relation to all known landscape.
We are evidently in front of a work of pure meditation, a glimpse of wisdom towards a path in the unity of its light, going from largely founded structures in the foreground to a sort of transcendence of the infinite space already measured by destiny. A little later, one finds the confirmation of the gravity of a message in the livid range of Fort Carré d'Antibes or the austerity of La Cathédrale, like a presentiment of the Mouettes taking flight, which engages in an existential dizziness.
Ciel, in its obviousness, in its refusal of any spectacular effect, perfectly mastered in its emotional density, can be considered as a great work, testament to a painter of genius. Additionally, on the cusp of a premeditated departure, in the intelligent counterpoint of his resonances, how can one avoid feeling in it the moral weight of the memories of Saint Petersburg and its large clear skies above the Nava, rescued from the deep consciousness?
We would like to thank Jean-François Jaeger for the above contribution.
The general circumstances of Nicolas de Staël's short life are now well known, from his birth in Saint Petersburg in 1914 to his death in Antibes in 1955. An early vocation enticed the young Russian refugee in Brussels to seek a high quality academic training in the arts. His impatience helped him quicky recognise the limits of a classical approach. His spirit of adventure pushed him to search in museums, alongside recognised masters, for models of freedom. Their example guided him while he refined his own formation during solitarty voyages. It was in Morocco that he had the luck of meeting the painter Jeannine Guillou, whose maturity helped tame, during their few years together, the young artist's exuberance. The urgency to live, the urgency to create, and the urgency to learn dominated this figure whose stature was impressive not only intellectually but also physically.
In Nice, having encountered various artists engaged in the field of abstraction, such as Magnelli, Delaunay and Arp, he discovered a new area of experimentation, which he cultivated by dealing directly with the technical problems of medium and structure as well as the drive of his own creative instinct.
Back in Paris, de Staël's hard work started showing a glimpse of his personal style, first heavy with a dramatic atmosphere and the material treated with thick strokes, then slowly evolving towards an affirmation of a more and more subtle relationship between light and space. Always at the extreme of powerful sensations, a too stringent aesthetic environment drove him to look for more freedom in a stronger confrontation between nature and reality. He suddenly revolted against a budding abstract academia and created a scandal at the Salon de Mai with his monumental Park des Princes in 1952. This event was the breaking point with those who viewed him as a leader and isolated him even further in his revolutionary views. Despite his daily economic problems, his need of expansion and grandeur made him work on a monumental scale unknown at the time, which would later be used only by his American couterparts. Measuring himself against a vast space, organising it into the rythms of energy and charging it with significance like an orchestration of measured violence now became the integral part of the purpose of his work.
He was engaged in a dialogue of a new order with reality. According to his adventurous spirit, each experience was lived to the extreme of innovation, with a view to integrating the abstract elements in the recreation of a truth that has become an aesthetic revelation on the canvas. This disposition to cultivate improbability with a view to hunting down the truth of his vision required as much rigour and lucidity as imagination. He even pursued it "sur le motif" as the classical painters put it, which was considered by the abstract painters as absolute heresy. He revelled wholly in it with, as he stated, "1) La fulgurance de l'authorité. 2) La fulgurance de l'hésitation". Nature became a constant source of propositions of structures and spaces, of rythms, breaths and lights, of harmonies and magic.
In a letter to the poet René Char, Nicholas de Staël evoked with nostalgia "la passion que j'avais enfant pour les grands ciels" above Saint Petersburg. Throughout his career, he appears to have paid particular attention to the sky, be it that of nature and that shown by Turner, Lorrain, El Greco or Corot.
In many outdoor studies in Nantes, Chevreuses, Gentilly or later above the beaches of the North Sea or the Mediterranean, the sky always played an important role in the composition: sometimes as a wall, sometimes fluid and deep. One should recall the definition the painter gave, which conditioned his entire evolution: "L'espace pictural est un mur, mais tous les oiseaux du monde y volent librement. A toute profondeur."
Starting in 1952, the large composition from the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM), Les toits, which earlier had the title Ciel de Dieppe, underlines the successful synthesis between abstraction and reality. Year after year, a large number of landscapes evoked the presence of the sky: Ciel à Nantes, Ciel à Honfleur, Mer et nuages, Ciel gris bleu and, in 1954, Ciel et mer. Nearly all of them are marked by an atmospheric feel, animated by the playfulness of the clouds.
In other paintings, particularly those created in Sicily, the sky was treated without any link to the reality of sight. It became an abstract element of the earth-sky-man trinity, functioning as a translation of a feeling or an emotion, its texture and colour obeying only the aesthetic needs of the work, sometimes to the extent of violent oppositions of colour and form.
The calm and serene feel of the 1955 Ciel can surprise the viewer by its contrasts. It clearly belongs to another order of research or expression, to another level of conciousness.
There reigns in this exceptional work a concentration and subtlety in the expression of light, a slowness and particular care in the placing of each brush stroke, a harmony from value to value, from tone to tone, like an explored distance in relation to all known landscape.
We are evidently in front of a work of pure meditation, a glimpse of wisdom towards a path in the unity of its light, going from largely founded structures in the foreground to a sort of transcendence of the infinite space already measured by destiny. A little later, one finds the confirmation of the gravity of a message in the livid range of Fort Carré d'Antibes or the austerity of La Cathédrale, like a presentiment of the Mouettes taking flight, which engages in an existential dizziness.
Ciel, in its obviousness, in its refusal of any spectacular effect, perfectly mastered in its emotional density, can be considered as a great work, testament to a painter of genius. Additionally, on the cusp of a premeditated departure, in the intelligent counterpoint of his resonances, how can one avoid feeling in it the moral weight of the memories of Saint Petersburg and its large clear skies above the Nava, rescued from the deep consciousness?
We would like to thank Jean-François Jaeger for the above contribution.