Peinture

In 1952 de Staël wrote in a letter 'I am thinking of being able to develop, God knows how, an increase in the clarity of painting and that puts me in a permanently disagreeable and troubled state' (D. Sutton, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., ed. Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p.14). During the course of that year de Staël confronted the difficulties of the progression from abstract painting to figurative. He was, in effect, reversing the course of his artistic development that had been evolving throughout the preceding years. Having always struggled to express a series of personal and visual conflicts that he felt could only be done in non-figurative terms, 1952 was the year in which he concluded that his achieved style could yield no more. The resultant works of this crucial moment in his career, of which Peinture is one, demonstrate the novelty of his approach. This painting is a striking example of the purity and freshness attained as he began to bridge the gap between abstract and figurative. Having always been intent on the pure representation of pure formal values based on observations of his surrounding environment Peinture shows his progression to the figurative landscapes of the 1950s. The spread of pale grey colour across the canvas subtly interrupted by the coloured elements complete a harmonious visual composition. Always captivated by the play of tones in a composition, here again he favours a rational series of coloured patches across the composition in his concern for clarity of form.
A substantial part of the effect of de Staël's paintings was the attraction to the tactile quality of paint. The malleability and expressive potential of oils were now carefully arranged in calm pictorial forms. Although he discards the obvious impetuosity of previous works, the movement towards the more simplified order still revealed inner tensions, this time controlled by linear, even geometric order. While the compositional structure of these works in the subsequent years was more subdued in comparison to their predecessors, the application of the paint with the ubiquitous palette knife was still apparent, and to remain a characteristic element of his entire oeuvre.