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Lot Essay
'One never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records, with a thousand vibrations, the shock one has received, or will receive'
(N. de Staël, letter to P. Lecuire 1949, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 172).
'A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space'
(N. de Staël, quoted in Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 22).
Painted in 1954 Marseille dates from the pinnacle of Nicolas de Staël's career when nature and landscape became his preferred subjects through which to explore colour and form. A vibrantly chromatic painting infused with the brilliant light of the South of France, Marseille is rendered in a bold Mediterranean palette, redolent of the brilliant white buildings with their red tile roofs, and the dazzling Azure blue sea of the painting's namesake. A seminal work from a key period in the artist's practice, Marseille has a strong exhibition pedigree, first shown the year of its execution at Galerie Jacques Dubourg. It was subsequently first seen in London at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956 and at the Venice Biennale in 1964. In 1966 it was shown in America touring to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Marseille was last publicly seen in the UK at Nicolas de Staël, Tate Gallery, London in 1981.
Celebrated for their engaging vacillation between abstraction and figuration de Staël's Mediterranean landscapes of 1953 and 1954 are regarded as key examples of the artist's radical approach to painting, controversial amongst many of his contemporaries. A dynamic scene near abstraction but with a discernable horizon line suggesting boats moored at sea, in Marseille de Staël conveys landscape and movement through generously applied, rich swathes of pure, thick, oil colour in scarlet, violet and ultramarine. 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. In doing so, de Staël has given visual form to his experience of the sun-drenched coast of Southern France, one that would move him deeply in the last years of his life and that recalls the artist's own words: 'one never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records, with a thousand vibrations, the shock one has received, or will receive' (N. de Staël, letter to P. Lecuire 1949 reproduced in, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 172). Not seen by the public in over thirty years, Marseille was first exhibited the year of its creation at the Galerie Jacques Dubourg and has since been included in major international exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Tate Gallery, London.
Concluding a period of intense and rapid artistic development, Marseille is the result of an epiphany de Staël had over the course of 1953. De Staël was first inspired to introduce figurative reality in his pictures after watching a football match at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. There he saw how the players moved in their brightly-coloured red, white and blue uniforms under the glaring stadium spotlights. This experience motivated him to capture movement with his palette knife through forms of pure colour. Indeed in its strikingly similar colour palette, Marseille seems to be an homage to this pivotal event. The varied landscapes de Staël experienced during his travels throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, along with his visit to see the 17th century Dutch landscape painting exhibition at the Royal Academy in June 1953, also inspired him to immerse himself in this painterly tradition. During a trip to New York in 1953 to attend the opening of his exhibition at Knoedler Gallery, the artist became homesick for France. Upon returning to France, de Staël rededicated himself to capturing the unique brilliance of light he had found in the South of France. Indeed his only consolation during his sojourn to America was the pictures he admired by Matisse at the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia an artist who had first impressed him as early as 1922 when he saw his work on a visit to Paris while studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Laden with the imagery he had seen of Matisse's work, de Staël visited the first exhibition devoted solely to Matisse's cut-outs at Heinz Berggruen et Cie, Paris the same year. Matisse's body of work such as The Snail (1953) inspired de Staël to explore the papier collé technique and its ability to convey powerful abstract landscapes in its autonomous fragments of pure colour.
We can see the fruits of these investigations present in the reductive power of Marseille where de Staël has deftly rendered two dominating planes of contrasting flat colour to denote the horizon line. Rendering form through blocks of saturated colour, de Staël presents an opulent vision, 'burning up the retina of one's eye on the 'shattering-blue,'' and in a letter which almost seems to be directly referring to this work remarks on, 'seeing the sea red and the sand violet' (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, June 1952, reproduced in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Paris, 1981, p. 16). As Douglas Cooper pointed out, it is hard to see the rich Mediterranean-inspired colours de Staël uses in his 1953 and 1954 landscapes without thinking of Matisse or to believe 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).
By the early 1950s de Staël was becoming more and more enchanted with the landscapes he was experiencing during his travels around the Mediterranean. This period of travel and discovery inspired his celebrated Agrigente series, many of which were painted in his home in Ménerbes, Southern France. In these last years of his life, de Staël painted still-lifes of boats and interiors with renewed vigour, persevering with a style that maintained a visual tension between abstraction and figuration at a time when the artistic vision of the Abstract Expressionists dominated the art world. And while his works from this period do find affinities with Abstract Expressionist works by Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still, de Staël argued against the popular edicts of this movement that, 'a painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space' (N. de Staël quoted in, Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 22). Instead of setting up abstract painting in opposition to the figurative, the artist built compositional harmony through the very tactility of the paint itself, using the characteristics of impasto and the saturation of colour to imply forms. 'I want my painting... to be like a tree, like a forest,' de Staël explained, 'one moves from a line, from a delicate stroke, to a point, to a patch... just as one moves from a twig to a trunk of a tree. But everything must hold together, everything must be in place' (N. de Staël, letter to R. van Gindertaël 1955, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 171). Just as in the Agrigente series, which celebrated the Mediterranean landscape with a purity of visual experience and sensation, Marseille too conveys a sense of timelessness while also capturing the very specific mood and atmosphere of Southern France. Indeed, as his friend, the famous critic and collector, Douglas Cooper once pointed out, the artist had an extraordinary 'capacity for sinking himself in a locality and absorbing visually a lasting experience of its tonal and formal characteristics' (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 76).
(N. de Staël, letter to P. Lecuire 1949, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 172).
'A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space'
(N. de Staël, quoted in Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 22).
Painted in 1954 Marseille dates from the pinnacle of Nicolas de Staël's career when nature and landscape became his preferred subjects through which to explore colour and form. A vibrantly chromatic painting infused with the brilliant light of the South of France, Marseille is rendered in a bold Mediterranean palette, redolent of the brilliant white buildings with their red tile roofs, and the dazzling Azure blue sea of the painting's namesake. A seminal work from a key period in the artist's practice, Marseille has a strong exhibition pedigree, first shown the year of its execution at Galerie Jacques Dubourg. It was subsequently first seen in London at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956 and at the Venice Biennale in 1964. In 1966 it was shown in America touring to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Marseille was last publicly seen in the UK at Nicolas de Staël, Tate Gallery, London in 1981.
Celebrated for their engaging vacillation between abstraction and figuration de Staël's Mediterranean landscapes of 1953 and 1954 are regarded as key examples of the artist's radical approach to painting, controversial amongst many of his contemporaries. A dynamic scene near abstraction but with a discernable horizon line suggesting boats moored at sea, in Marseille de Staël conveys landscape and movement through generously applied, rich swathes of pure, thick, oil colour in scarlet, violet and ultramarine. 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. In doing so, de Staël has given visual form to his experience of the sun-drenched coast of Southern France, one that would move him deeply in the last years of his life and that recalls the artist's own words: 'one never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records, with a thousand vibrations, the shock one has received, or will receive' (N. de Staël, letter to P. Lecuire 1949 reproduced in, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 172). Not seen by the public in over thirty years, Marseille was first exhibited the year of its creation at the Galerie Jacques Dubourg and has since been included in major international exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and The Tate Gallery, London.
Concluding a period of intense and rapid artistic development, Marseille is the result of an epiphany de Staël had over the course of 1953. De Staël was first inspired to introduce figurative reality in his pictures after watching a football match at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. There he saw how the players moved in their brightly-coloured red, white and blue uniforms under the glaring stadium spotlights. This experience motivated him to capture movement with his palette knife through forms of pure colour. Indeed in its strikingly similar colour palette, Marseille seems to be an homage to this pivotal event. The varied landscapes de Staël experienced during his travels throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, along with his visit to see the 17th century Dutch landscape painting exhibition at the Royal Academy in June 1953, also inspired him to immerse himself in this painterly tradition. During a trip to New York in 1953 to attend the opening of his exhibition at Knoedler Gallery, the artist became homesick for France. Upon returning to France, de Staël rededicated himself to capturing the unique brilliance of light he had found in the South of France. Indeed his only consolation during his sojourn to America was the pictures he admired by Matisse at the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia an artist who had first impressed him as early as 1922 when he saw his work on a visit to Paris while studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Laden with the imagery he had seen of Matisse's work, de Staël visited the first exhibition devoted solely to Matisse's cut-outs at Heinz Berggruen et Cie, Paris the same year. Matisse's body of work such as The Snail (1953) inspired de Staël to explore the papier collé technique and its ability to convey powerful abstract landscapes in its autonomous fragments of pure colour.
We can see the fruits of these investigations present in the reductive power of Marseille where de Staël has deftly rendered two dominating planes of contrasting flat colour to denote the horizon line. Rendering form through blocks of saturated colour, de Staël presents an opulent vision, 'burning up the retina of one's eye on the 'shattering-blue,'' and in a letter which almost seems to be directly referring to this work remarks on, 'seeing the sea red and the sand violet' (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, June 1952, reproduced in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Paris, 1981, p. 16). As Douglas Cooper pointed out, it is hard to see the rich Mediterranean-inspired colours de Staël uses in his 1953 and 1954 landscapes without thinking of Matisse or to believe 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).
By the early 1950s de Staël was becoming more and more enchanted with the landscapes he was experiencing during his travels around the Mediterranean. This period of travel and discovery inspired his celebrated Agrigente series, many of which were painted in his home in Ménerbes, Southern France. In these last years of his life, de Staël painted still-lifes of boats and interiors with renewed vigour, persevering with a style that maintained a visual tension between abstraction and figuration at a time when the artistic vision of the Abstract Expressionists dominated the art world. And while his works from this period do find affinities with Abstract Expressionist works by Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still, de Staël argued against the popular edicts of this movement that, 'a painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space' (N. de Staël quoted in, Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 22). Instead of setting up abstract painting in opposition to the figurative, the artist built compositional harmony through the very tactility of the paint itself, using the characteristics of impasto and the saturation of colour to imply forms. 'I want my painting... to be like a tree, like a forest,' de Staël explained, 'one moves from a line, from a delicate stroke, to a point, to a patch... just as one moves from a twig to a trunk of a tree. But everything must hold together, everything must be in place' (N. de Staël, letter to R. van Gindertaël 1955, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 171). Just as in the Agrigente series, which celebrated the Mediterranean landscape with a purity of visual experience and sensation, Marseille too conveys a sense of timelessness while also capturing the very specific mood and atmosphere of Southern France. Indeed, as his friend, the famous critic and collector, Douglas Cooper once pointed out, the artist had an extraordinary 'capacity for sinking himself in a locality and absorbing visually a lasting experience of its tonal and formal characteristics' (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 76).