Lot Essay
After his meeting with the French art dealer Jacques Dubourg in 1949, Nicolas de Staël began his journey towards becoming one of the most favoured artists of his time. Certainly after his London exhibition at the Mathiesen Gallery in 1952, de Staël was thought by many to be the most significant new painter in Europe. Indeed, between the years 1943 and his tragic suicide in 1955, he was to establish a style perpetuated by an ever increasing individuality.
In Red Sky de Staël juxtaposes an assymetry with a perfectly balanced composition, a thick impastoed brushstroke with a transparent luminosity, and a strong geometry with an explosion of free form. These apparent contradictions serve to imbue the work with a unique vibrancy. Employing brush, palette-knife and even pieces of wood with which to layer on the paint, the landscape has been transformed into blocks of richly-impastoed colour, and like Cézanne, de Staël uses these areas to create distance.
Like many of his contemporaries, following the inevitable path which modernism was to pave for itself, de Staël was preoccupied with an abstraction of form. However, much of his originality lies in the way in which he did not believe in the total abandonment of the subject. In Red Sky we never completely lose a sense of concrete visual perception and there is a ghostlike veil of figurative form which provides the painting with an emotional sensibility and mood with which his work is inextricably linked. Shapes and references to a landscape gradually become readable, enveloped in varying shades of light.
The aged Van Dongen wrote to George Duthuit of de Staël's work, "When I think of de Staël's paintings, I see a horizontal line, a vast horizon. Above the horizon an immense sky and below a meadow, a plain mottled green where tulips sway and there are crows both black and white... The green-grey sea lies in the eyes of our friend. I am unacquainted with his anger, but I can hear the chuckling, side-splitting, sobbing laugh of the wandering urchin and giant that he is."
De Staël was fascinated by sky and landscape and said of it, "One does not begin with nothing. When nature is not the starting-point, the picture is inevitably bad."
Indeed, de Staël used landscape as the vehicle through which to transpose internal, psychological states of mind and human experience into pictorial language. He has regulated inner feeling and ordered it into the shapes and colours of this outdoor scene, stamping the exterior world with his own psychological geometry. It is this constant fusion of exterior and interior - between what the artist sees and what he feels - which gives this work its exquisitely ordered beauty.
In Red Sky de Staël juxtaposes an assymetry with a perfectly balanced composition, a thick impastoed brushstroke with a transparent luminosity, and a strong geometry with an explosion of free form. These apparent contradictions serve to imbue the work with a unique vibrancy. Employing brush, palette-knife and even pieces of wood with which to layer on the paint, the landscape has been transformed into blocks of richly-impastoed colour, and like Cézanne, de Staël uses these areas to create distance.
Like many of his contemporaries, following the inevitable path which modernism was to pave for itself, de Staël was preoccupied with an abstraction of form. However, much of his originality lies in the way in which he did not believe in the total abandonment of the subject. In Red Sky we never completely lose a sense of concrete visual perception and there is a ghostlike veil of figurative form which provides the painting with an emotional sensibility and mood with which his work is inextricably linked. Shapes and references to a landscape gradually become readable, enveloped in varying shades of light.
The aged Van Dongen wrote to George Duthuit of de Staël's work, "When I think of de Staël's paintings, I see a horizontal line, a vast horizon. Above the horizon an immense sky and below a meadow, a plain mottled green where tulips sway and there are crows both black and white... The green-grey sea lies in the eyes of our friend. I am unacquainted with his anger, but I can hear the chuckling, side-splitting, sobbing laugh of the wandering urchin and giant that he is."
De Staël was fascinated by sky and landscape and said of it, "One does not begin with nothing. When nature is not the starting-point, the picture is inevitably bad."
Indeed, de Staël used landscape as the vehicle through which to transpose internal, psychological states of mind and human experience into pictorial language. He has regulated inner feeling and ordered it into the shapes and colours of this outdoor scene, stamping the exterior world with his own psychological geometry. It is this constant fusion of exterior and interior - between what the artist sees and what he feels - which gives this work its exquisitely ordered beauty.