Nicolas de Staël
(1914 – 1955)
Nicolas de Staël was born in Saint Petersburg on January 5, 1914, became a naturalized French citizen in 1948, and died in Antibes on March 16, 1955. His career was short, dense and tragic. After studying in Belgium at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Gilles-Les-Bruxelles, a decade of travel and a brief career as an officer, he returned to painting in 1940. A prolific artist, he painted over a thousand canvases in the space of fifteen years, influenced by the masters Cézanne, Braque, Picasso and Matisse. He also looked to Byzantine art as well as the Flemish masters, and possessed an enlightened knowledge of art history. During these fifteen years of hard work, his painting evolved rapidly. He categorically refused to belong to either the figurative or abstract currents, always navigating between the two. From the dark colors of his beginnings, his work leads to the exaltation of color. Thick layers of paint superimposed in a play of materials, from impasto to knife during the 1940s, gave way to more fluid painting from 1951 onwards. Nicolas de Staël drew inspiration from his travels in Morocco, Italy and Spain, and from his circle of friends, including Jacques Dubourg, Pierre Lecuire, Sonia Delauney, Alberto Magnelli, Georges Braque, André Lanskoy, Christian Zervos and René Char.
Nicolas de Staël died suddenly at the age of 41 in Antibes. Recent exhibitions include a major retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in 2023, curated by Pierre Wat. In addition to numerous private collections, the painter's works belong to the national and international institutional collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, and many others.
