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Lot Essay
‘These canvases [have] a luminosity which de Staël had never achieved before. Here for the first time he really displays the needle-sharp acuteness of his eye and the subtlety with which it could distinguish between minute differences of tone. Here too he lets himself go and delights in strong colour for its own sake because he knows that at last he has it under control’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 36).
Nicolas de Staël’s Paysage (Composition; Composition Rouge et Noire sur fond Jaune; Paysage Rouge et Noir), 1951-52 embodies all the elements that define his mature body of work. Last seen in public nearly half a century ago, Paysage forms part of the illustrious Blum Collection. The present work made its public debut at the artist’s first ever exhibition in England in 1952. Shown alongside Composition fond Rouge, 1951, now in the collection of Fond national d’Art contemporain, Paris, and Les Toits, 1952, now in the collection of Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Paysage was one of 26 works exhibited at the Matthiesen Gallery, London, a show which received a great deal of attention in the British art world and garnered accolades in both the art and national press. It was subsequently exhibited at de Staël’s retrospectives held in Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1956, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, 1959-60, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1960 and Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, 1965.
Constructed from a carefully considered patchwork of pure colour blocks, de Staël allows the space between to reveal contrasting tones, bringing about a dynamic compositional harmony through an interplay of positive and negative space. Rendered in a palette of acacia, cerise and onyx, Paysage epitomises the tension between abstraction and figuration which de Staël was striving to achieve. Indeed Douglas Cooper, de Staël’s close friend and art critic notes of this period that ‘In the second half of 1951 he abandoned his patchwork of brickwork effects in favour of a sort of mosaic technique... In such pictures thickly painted little rectangles of colour are used in certain focal areas, the rest of the canvas being treated in broad planes of more or less flat paint, while everywhere different tonalities are allowed to overlap or to accumulate one on top of another. The vibrant, multi-coloured effect which results makes for a curious spatial illusion, but also in these paintings one feels that the artist is striving towards a figurative image, because the tesserae serve a structural purpose and suggest solid forms’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 35). Existing in a delicate balance of colour and form, Paysage’s bold blocks of pigment have a raw and intense physicality that recalls the gestural vigour of America’s celebrated Action Painters, who were contemporaneous with de Staël, while still presenting a discernible figuration that sets his painterly practice apart. It was in this way that de Staël charted his own path against the pure abstract style that was de rigueur during the post-War period and bridged the gap between his contemporaries. Of this almost antithetical pairing of abstraction and figuration de Staël explained to Cooper in a letter written in the same year of this work’s conception, ‘Painting, true painting, always tends towards all aspects, that is to say, towards the impossible sum of the present moment, the past and the future... I’m doing something which can’t be examined closely, which can’t be taken to pieces, which has a value through its adventurous quality, which one may accept or not... One uses strong, delicate, or very delicate, direct or indirect values, or even the converse of value – what matters is that it should be right’ (N. de Staël, quoted in letter to D. Cooper, January 1954, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 18).
Alternating between palette knife and brush, de Staël heaped paint on to his canvas in short swipes, pulling and pushing the pigment in order to convey a sense of the tactility of the material itself and highlight the formal qualities of colour. Rendered in progressive layers, de Staël creates a sense of rhythm in his discrete passages of fiery red and daubs of cool grey that adds richness and complexity to the overall composition. An essential ingredient for the artist, de Staël used colour to expand the space of his compositions and to bring out visceral sensory responses. The works from this period are ‘still closer to nature and more consciously impressionistic in kind than those which preceded them’, Cooper explains. ‘These canvases [have] a luminosity which de Staël had never achieved before. Here for the first time he really displays the needle-sharp acuteness of his eye and the subtlety with which it could distinguish between minute differences of tone. Here too he lets himself go and delights in strong colour for its own sake because he knows that at last he has it under control’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 36). In his idiosyncratic need to bring expression to the natural world, de Staël said: ‘All my life I have needed to think painting, to see paintings, to make paintings to help myself live, to free myself from all the impressions, all the sensations, all the anxieties to which I have never found any other issue than painting’ (N. de Staël, catalogue preface for Knoedler Gallery 1953, in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 171).
Nicolas de Staël’s Paysage (Composition; Composition Rouge et Noire sur fond Jaune; Paysage Rouge et Noir), 1951-52 embodies all the elements that define his mature body of work. Last seen in public nearly half a century ago, Paysage forms part of the illustrious Blum Collection. The present work made its public debut at the artist’s first ever exhibition in England in 1952. Shown alongside Composition fond Rouge, 1951, now in the collection of Fond national d’Art contemporain, Paris, and Les Toits, 1952, now in the collection of Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Paysage was one of 26 works exhibited at the Matthiesen Gallery, London, a show which received a great deal of attention in the British art world and garnered accolades in both the art and national press. It was subsequently exhibited at de Staël’s retrospectives held in Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1956, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, 1959-60, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1960 and Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, 1965.
Constructed from a carefully considered patchwork of pure colour blocks, de Staël allows the space between to reveal contrasting tones, bringing about a dynamic compositional harmony through an interplay of positive and negative space. Rendered in a palette of acacia, cerise and onyx, Paysage epitomises the tension between abstraction and figuration which de Staël was striving to achieve. Indeed Douglas Cooper, de Staël’s close friend and art critic notes of this period that ‘In the second half of 1951 he abandoned his patchwork of brickwork effects in favour of a sort of mosaic technique... In such pictures thickly painted little rectangles of colour are used in certain focal areas, the rest of the canvas being treated in broad planes of more or less flat paint, while everywhere different tonalities are allowed to overlap or to accumulate one on top of another. The vibrant, multi-coloured effect which results makes for a curious spatial illusion, but also in these paintings one feels that the artist is striving towards a figurative image, because the tesserae serve a structural purpose and suggest solid forms’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 35). Existing in a delicate balance of colour and form, Paysage’s bold blocks of pigment have a raw and intense physicality that recalls the gestural vigour of America’s celebrated Action Painters, who were contemporaneous with de Staël, while still presenting a discernible figuration that sets his painterly practice apart. It was in this way that de Staël charted his own path against the pure abstract style that was de rigueur during the post-War period and bridged the gap between his contemporaries. Of this almost antithetical pairing of abstraction and figuration de Staël explained to Cooper in a letter written in the same year of this work’s conception, ‘Painting, true painting, always tends towards all aspects, that is to say, towards the impossible sum of the present moment, the past and the future... I’m doing something which can’t be examined closely, which can’t be taken to pieces, which has a value through its adventurous quality, which one may accept or not... One uses strong, delicate, or very delicate, direct or indirect values, or even the converse of value – what matters is that it should be right’ (N. de Staël, quoted in letter to D. Cooper, January 1954, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 18).
Alternating between palette knife and brush, de Staël heaped paint on to his canvas in short swipes, pulling and pushing the pigment in order to convey a sense of the tactility of the material itself and highlight the formal qualities of colour. Rendered in progressive layers, de Staël creates a sense of rhythm in his discrete passages of fiery red and daubs of cool grey that adds richness and complexity to the overall composition. An essential ingredient for the artist, de Staël used colour to expand the space of his compositions and to bring out visceral sensory responses. The works from this period are ‘still closer to nature and more consciously impressionistic in kind than those which preceded them’, Cooper explains. ‘These canvases [have] a luminosity which de Staël had never achieved before. Here for the first time he really displays the needle-sharp acuteness of his eye and the subtlety with which it could distinguish between minute differences of tone. Here too he lets himself go and delights in strong colour for its own sake because he knows that at last he has it under control’ (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 36). In his idiosyncratic need to bring expression to the natural world, de Staël said: ‘All my life I have needed to think painting, to see paintings, to make paintings to help myself live, to free myself from all the impressions, all the sensations, all the anxieties to which I have never found any other issue than painting’ (N. de Staël, catalogue preface for Knoedler Gallery 1953, in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981, p. 171).