La Ciotat

With its scintillating facets of violet, green, black and red set amid a serene expanse of blue and teal bands, La Ciotat is a sumptuous large-scale work from Nicolas de Staël’s annus mirabilis of 1952. The painting shifts before our eyes: it appears at once as a landscape composition and as an abstract arrangement of schematic forms. This majestic consolidation of abstract and figurative modes is typical of de Staël’s works of 1952, in which he fully realized his unique painterly language. He first began to paint directly from nature in the spring of that year when he embarked on a series of still lifes of flowers, then made several small landscapes en plein air in Normandy and in the Seine Valley. The present work, which appears to be a coastal scene, must have been painted slightly later, when he returned to the South of France and worked for several weeks at Le Lavandou and in the neighborhood of Marseilles. The symphonic arrangement of shape and color displays both de Staël’s musical eye for composition and his unique sensitivity to place. Having returned to figurative painting after a long period of abstract work, de Staël was now able to distil masterful, luminous meditations on color and form from his surroundings.

A turning point in de Staël’s journey towards works like La Ciotat was the large-scale canvas Toits (Roofs) (1951-52, Centre Georges Pompidou), which displays a faceted, mosaic-like landscape of blacks and greys beneath an upper half suggestive of the sky. Moving away from the pure abstraction of previous works, which were often simply titled Composition, the denotative title Toits opened the work up for a figurative reading. Already, de Staël was making intelligent use of layered color: warm, yellowish tones offset cooler blue-grays, while one dark ‘roof’ has a red surround similar to those that halo the bottles in the present work. In works like La Ciotat, however, de Staël treated his tones with far greater boldness. The newly incandescent colors of de Staël’s work were heavily informed by his travels through the Bormes region of the south of France in the summer of 1952, where he was astounded by the transformative dazzle of the sunlight. This environment would lead to the great Mediterranean landscape paintings which are among the most celebrated works of his career. For de Staël, communicating the impact of the visible world upon the senses was key. His paintings aimed for no extrapictorial meaning: works like La Ciotat, in their luminous passion for the pure act of seeing, attain a vital force that sets them apart from the abstract-figurative debates of de Staël’s time, and can be better seen as descended from a metaphysical or even Romantic sensibility. As Denys Sutton wrote in 1952, “de Staël established in these works his faith in a tangible work, nourished by light. He created ‘views’ that exist in that light haze or semi-darkness that appears when reality and dream come together, or in the mysterious but alert peace of a snowbound world. These are paintings that elevate the spirit to mountainous peaks” (D. Sutton, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat. Matthiessen Gallery, London, 1952, n.p.).

De Staël’s insistence on figurative subject matter was met with some consternation in Europe, where figuration was seen as outmoded. Upon his first American solo exhibition at Knoedler & Co. in 1953, however, the artist found a warmer reception. Less concerned than French viewers with the abstraction-figuration dilemma—a formal debate which held scant interest for de Staël himself—the audience in New York responded to the powerfully-expressed emotion of his works. Shown alongside such major 1952 paintings as Le Parc de Sceaux (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C) and Figures au bord de la mer (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), La Ciotat was part of a display of de Staël’s work at its very best. Reviews were plentiful and positive, and the show a huge commercial success. “In Europe today,” reported Time magazine, “de Staël is ranked among the most important ‘young’ artists. Manhattan critics, pleased to have something really new to write about, troweled on the praise. ‘Majestic,’ said the New York Times. Said Art News: ‘One of the few painters to emerge from postwar Paris with something to say, and a way of saying it with authority.’ Manhattan collectors were just as complimentary in a more practical way; by week’s end the show was a near sellout” (‘Say it with Slabs’, Time, 30 March 1953, p. 68). Attaining a unique compression of passionate vitality and pure pictorial power, La Ciotat is an icon of this triumphant peak of de Staël’s practice.