Nicolas de Staël

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Nicolas de Staël (born January 5, 1914 in Saint Petersburg , † March 16, 1955 in Antibes ) was a French painter of Russian-Baltic origin. He was a representative of informal painting , but soon found his own, always out of date style.

Life

Nicolas de Staël was born on January 5, 1914 in St. Petersburg. After the early death of both parents (father in 1921, mother in 1922) in exile in Ostrów Wielkopolski , in Poland, after the Russian Revolution , he and his two sisters grew up with wealthy family friends in Brussels . There he attended the Brussels Academy , where he received his first awards at the age of 20. De Staël's early work, which can be dated to the period from 1933 to 1941 and was still clearly under the impression of artists such as El Greco , Picasso and Cézanne , has largely fallen victim to the artist's will to destroy and is therefore only very sketchy reconstructable.

After traveling to the Netherlands , France , Spain and a few times to Morocco , where he met the young painter Jeannine Guillon in 1937, he settled in Paris in 1938 with her and her young son Antek . In 1939/40 de Staël served in the Foreign Legion in Tunisia . He then moved to Jeannine in Nice , where their daughter Anne was born in 1942. In Nice he was inspired by Christine Boumeester and her husband Henri Goetz to do abstract painting, which he then dedicated himself to for the next few years. At that time, abstract art was still largely considered non-representational in art academic circles and was only to achieve the status of one of the most important contemporary art genres in the following years .

Returned to Paris in September 1943, he soon entered the École de Paris . Jeannine died in February 1946. De Staël then married Françoise Chapouton, a teacher of his adopted son Antek. In 1947 and the following years, their children Laurence were born, their son Jerôme in 1948 and finally their son Gustave in 1954, already separated from his family.

In the early 1950s, especially from 1952 onwards, de Staël gradually changed from abstract to figurative art, which was to result in a synthesis of both styles. In doing so, he broke again with the artistic zeitgeist , which had meanwhile largely focused on abstract, non-figurative art. During this time, De Stäel also increasingly dealt with printmaking and illustration and collaborated with several poets, including a. with René Char and Pierre Lecuire , who in 1953 finally published a small edition of the joint book Voir Nicolas de Staël , which, along with a few scattered newspaper articles, is regarded as the first extensive textual examination of de Staël's work and is still considered to be of art-historical significance today Testimony is to be seen, not least because of the personal editorial participation of de Staël.

During the last three years of his life, de Staël was gripped by an extraordinary productivity and during this time created almost three-quarters of his entire oeuvre, which is still extant today. His work met with great interest, especially in America and New York in the 1950s, in its role as a young, up-and-coming art metropolis alongside Paris , which was more classicist and conservative, and then more hesitantly in France, where de Staël only spoke to relevant specialist circles until his death Term was.

In 1954 de Staël left his family and after a very exhausting year due to many international exhibitions and related trips, he moved back to Antibes , where he wanted to find peace by the sea. After unsuccessful attempts to overcome a deep creative identity crisis, he committed suicide on March 16, 1955, as farewell letters show, plagued by artistic self-doubt and severe depression , by jumping from the balcony of his studio in Antibes.

Painting style

Nicolas de Stael tried in many of his works abstraction with figuration to unite, which (especially representatives of abstract painting), he was rejected by many other painters. De Staël's often very large-format pictures (e.g. Le Concert - The Concert 350 × 600 cm) are characterized by strong colors applied over a large area. Another picture from this period is his standing nude Nu debout from 1953 (Nathan Collection, Zurich).

Today he is considered a pioneer for many younger artists. His works are in great demand today and rarely appear, but then at extremely high prices on the international art market. Overall, his style is considered timeless.

Nicolas de Staël was posthumously represented with works at documenta II (1959) and documenta III in Kassel in 1964 .

literature

  • Douglas Cooper : Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements , Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. London, 1961.
  • Petra Oepen: Nicolas de Staël: Reflections on career and afterlife . Dissertation, Bonn 2008. urn : nbn: de: hbz: 5-14177
  • Laurent Greilsamer: Le prince foudroyé. La vie de Nicolas de Staël . Fayard, Paris 1998.
  • Laurent Greilsamer: Nicolas de Staël: A life in a frenzy . Nostrum Verlag, Mülheim / Ruhr 2014. ( ISBN 978-3-981-64650-4 )

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Staël, Nicolas de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1955
Place of death Antibes