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Lot Essay
‘De Staël is an abstract impressionist in love with light and paint, which he lays on in thick vertical and horizontal slabs as if it were butter or putty to be spread across the canvas with a trowel. He has affinities with the Fauves (though line is absent from his art), but his real ancestors are Vermeer and Hercules Seghers. He is primarily a landscapist, though he paints flowers, nudes and bottles as well. [...] If nature is de Staël’s source and inspiration, he never sentimentalises or lets it do his work for him. His paintings are not only sensitive responses to light, space and mass; they exist in their own right, and their existence is secured by the artist’s passionate feeling for paint and for tensions which exist only in art – on a flat, framed surface’ (J. Fitzsimmons, ‘In Love with Paint’, in The Arts Digest, vol. 27, no. 12, March 1953, p. 16).
A cacophony of colour and form, Nicolas de Staël’s Le Lavandou is an exquisitely rendered compositional landscape inspired by the South of France. Executed during a critical period in the artist’s development, it was during the course of 1952 that the figurative universe began to bleed into de Staël’s paintings; his love of paint transformed increasingly into a love of colour, as is demonstrated by the almost Fauve incandescence of the colours in Le Lavandou. The agglomeration of forms traversing the central band of this board has an intense, self-propelling rhythm. In Le Lavandou, de Staël has shunned much of the thick build-up of impasto that characterised his earlier pictures; while the paint here is thick in places, and appears to have been applied in part by the palette knife, there is a sense of light and lightness, of liberation and jubilation. Constructed from a carefully considered patchwork of pure colour blocks that are not quite defined but distinct from one another, de Staël allows the space between to reveal a contrasting tone below, bringing about a dynamic compositional harmony. Charting his own path against the pure abstract style that was de rigueur during the post-war period, de Staël succeeds in bridging the gap between his contemporaries and the Modernist practices of Georges Braque and Henri Matisse.
Critically, Le Lavandou was created in the months following an epiphanic moment in de Staël’s practice. In April of 1952, only a month or so before Le Lavandou was created, de Staël watched a football match at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. It was at this game, where he saw how the players moved in their brightly-coloured red, white and blue uniforms under the glaring stadium spotlights, that he was first inspired to introduce figurative reality in his pictures. This experience motivated him to capture movement with his palette knife through forms of pure colour. We can see the fruits of these investigations present in the reductive power of Le Lavandou where de Staël has deftly rendered two dominating planes of contrasting fat colour to denote the horizon line. Rendering form through blocks of saturated colour, de Staël presents an opulent vision, and indeed he could have been speaking of this work when he wrote to his friend and gallerist in June of 1952 about the sensation in his work of ‘burning up the retina of one’s eye on the “shattering-blue,”’ (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, June 1952, reproduced in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou , Paris, 1981, p. 16).
The structure here has the air of being free, the placement of the coloured shapes dependent only on de Staël’s sure eye. This control, exercised in his delicately built up tones of coral to the palest of pinks to the most strident of persimmon, which are countered with turquoises, periwinkles and ultimately, a heavy band of diffusive ultramarine. As Cooper notes, ‘each block has a distinctive, though not necessarily a pure, tonality. They are not defined by outlines, but separated one from another, the space between being left free to reveal a contrasting underpaint, which may be fiery or cool according to the tonality above’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 33). Le Lavandou is distinct, for it is not a layer of underpaint which the artist uses to create negative space between his coloured tesserae, but the bare board itself. With de Staël’s use of white or negative space around the blocks of pure saturated colour, he presents a harmony which finds resonance with Henri Matisse’s own theories on colour and line seen in his papier collés from the 1940s. While de Staël only came into formal contact with Matisse’s cutouts at Heinz Berggruen et Cie, Paris in 1953, Henri Matisse, Papiers découpés included works made in the same spirit as Matisse’s The Snail, 1953, inspiring de Staël to explore the papier collé technique and its ability to convey powerful abstract landscapes in its autonomous fragments of pure colour. De Staël took Matisse’s lessons on colour and developed them into his own visual language rooted in paint rather than paper. Of this influence Cooper believes that de Staël would have felt ‘impelled to constantly sharpen and refine his tonal sensibility without the challenges of Matisse… His great admiration of Matisse’s papiers découpés certainly gave de Staël the impetus to compose with similar large masses of pure colour, while his conception of papier collé was…(evidently)… based on what he had learnt from Matisse’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, pp. 86-87).
A cacophony of colour and form, Nicolas de Staël’s Le Lavandou is an exquisitely rendered compositional landscape inspired by the South of France. Executed during a critical period in the artist’s development, it was during the course of 1952 that the figurative universe began to bleed into de Staël’s paintings; his love of paint transformed increasingly into a love of colour, as is demonstrated by the almost Fauve incandescence of the colours in Le Lavandou. The agglomeration of forms traversing the central band of this board has an intense, self-propelling rhythm. In Le Lavandou, de Staël has shunned much of the thick build-up of impasto that characterised his earlier pictures; while the paint here is thick in places, and appears to have been applied in part by the palette knife, there is a sense of light and lightness, of liberation and jubilation. Constructed from a carefully considered patchwork of pure colour blocks that are not quite defined but distinct from one another, de Staël allows the space between to reveal a contrasting tone below, bringing about a dynamic compositional harmony. Charting his own path against the pure abstract style that was de rigueur during the post-war period, de Staël succeeds in bridging the gap between his contemporaries and the Modernist practices of Georges Braque and Henri Matisse.
Critically, Le Lavandou was created in the months following an epiphanic moment in de Staël’s practice. In April of 1952, only a month or so before Le Lavandou was created, de Staël watched a football match at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. It was at this game, where he saw how the players moved in their brightly-coloured red, white and blue uniforms under the glaring stadium spotlights, that he was first inspired to introduce figurative reality in his pictures. This experience motivated him to capture movement with his palette knife through forms of pure colour. We can see the fruits of these investigations present in the reductive power of Le Lavandou where de Staël has deftly rendered two dominating planes of contrasting fat colour to denote the horizon line. Rendering form through blocks of saturated colour, de Staël presents an opulent vision, and indeed he could have been speaking of this work when he wrote to his friend and gallerist in June of 1952 about the sensation in his work of ‘burning up the retina of one’s eye on the “shattering-blue,”’ (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, June 1952, reproduced in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou , Paris, 1981, p. 16).
The structure here has the air of being free, the placement of the coloured shapes dependent only on de Staël’s sure eye. This control, exercised in his delicately built up tones of coral to the palest of pinks to the most strident of persimmon, which are countered with turquoises, periwinkles and ultimately, a heavy band of diffusive ultramarine. As Cooper notes, ‘each block has a distinctive, though not necessarily a pure, tonality. They are not defined by outlines, but separated one from another, the space between being left free to reveal a contrasting underpaint, which may be fiery or cool according to the tonality above’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 33). Le Lavandou is distinct, for it is not a layer of underpaint which the artist uses to create negative space between his coloured tesserae, but the bare board itself. With de Staël’s use of white or negative space around the blocks of pure saturated colour, he presents a harmony which finds resonance with Henri Matisse’s own theories on colour and line seen in his papier collés from the 1940s. While de Staël only came into formal contact with Matisse’s cutouts at Heinz Berggruen et Cie, Paris in 1953, Henri Matisse, Papiers découpés included works made in the same spirit as Matisse’s The Snail, 1953, inspiring de Staël to explore the papier collé technique and its ability to convey powerful abstract landscapes in its autonomous fragments of pure colour. De Staël took Matisse’s lessons on colour and developed them into his own visual language rooted in paint rather than paper. Of this influence Cooper believes that de Staël would have felt ‘impelled to constantly sharpen and refine his tonal sensibility without the challenges of Matisse… His great admiration of Matisse’s papiers découpés certainly gave de Staël the impetus to compose with similar large masses of pure colour, while his conception of papier collé was…(evidently)… based on what he had learnt from Matisse’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, pp. 86-87).