Exclusive Offers & Updates!
Prints.Com Logo
About Us      Contact Us      View Cart
For Help Ordering    
1-800-728-0527
Search our Art Prints and Posters search left
Powered by Netrics

Nicholas De Stael

Collections
Fiona  Armer

Nicholas De Stael

Artist Biography

Back to Art, Prints & Posters Collection
Nicholas De Stael

New York in the 1950s saw the golden years of Abstract Expressionist art, prints and posters. One of the best was Nicholas de Stael. De Stael was born into a Russian noble family in St. Petersburg in 1914, three years before the Bolshevik Revolution. His family left Russia in 1919 and moved first to Poland, where his father died, and finally made its way to Brussels, where de Stael was educated. He spent his early life traveling throughout Europe before settling in Paris. He served in the French Foreign Legion in 1939. After years of hardship and hunger in occupied France, de Stael began to enjoy a post-war public success that eventually led him to move his family to the south of France, away from the pressures of Paris. He purchased a chateau in 1953 at Menerbes in the Vaucluse. He also took a studio in Antibes, which is where, physically and emotionally exhausted, he took his life on Mar. 16, 1955.

De Stael has become a French national treasure, and has been the subject of numerous European retrospectives and critical studies. Today he may be considered too romantic, too colorful, too emotional and too decorative for the more ascetic and conceptually savvy audience. But for many painters he is just this side of a minor saint. He is thought of as a master of "touch” and "bravura” and "impasto,” all words that describe the kind of energy his art, prints and posters might contain without being explosive. De Staelss work is always determined, controlled and poised, much like the temper of the aristocrat he portrayed. It is de Stael's color and conquest of his painting surface that gives his canvases their fortitude, no matter what their size, and there are some very small works in this show. With palette knife in hand, de Stael was able to carve and cut his paint so that its edges seem sharp and hard. The resulting compositions, as is the case of Le Mur (1951), have the curious look of cross sections of crystalline minerals or ancient mosaics. In this picture de Stael composed a palette built of grays, greens and browns, all treated with the same value and texture, mute like stones but visually eloquent.

De Stael is one of those painters whose forebears are present at all times. Like many 19th-century French painters, Jongkind and Boudin come to mind, he was in love with the sea and the beach. He excelled in the kind of early modernism explored by the Nabis and Gauguin. Finally he mastered a quiet classicism that placed him in relationship to Morandi. Yet his appetite for such composure could erupt instantly into a wildly colorful mid-day landscape of hot, bright orange, red and yellows, as in Agriegente (1954), or turn back to a more somber, meditative mood of the same view at dusk. De Stael could be Hollywood's picture of the sensitive, chain-smoking French painter, part aristocrat and part bohemian, whose elegant life and tragic suicide at the youthful age of 41 still fascinates the Parisian art world. A well-traveled life, success achieved and then forgotten. But de Stael's tall, dark and handsome profile was part of the Existential generation of post-war France, and there is something missing in terms of a serious appraisal of his art, prints and posters and career.

Nicholas De Stael Art, Prints and Posters Collection