.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'De Staël... was a master at reducing things to essentials and his painting is never rhetorical or overloaded. Being a very fine painter, as well as a painter who loved broad effects, he could manage with a few carefully chosen shapes and subtle tonalities... to convey an extraordinarily full visual experience' (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 73).
AGRIGENTO
With its dominating horizontal planes of cerulean blue and lemon yellow powerfully suggesting a broad expanse of land and sky, this painting, Agrigente is one of the earliest, largest and most ambitious examples of arguably the most important series by Nicolas de Staël. It is also a work that is unique among them in that de Staäl has signed, titled and dated it on its reverse: Agrigente, Août, 1953 (Agrigento, August, 1953). This is a date that refers not to the time of the painting's execution, but also to the time of de Staël's visit to Agrigento. The painting, like all the others in the series, was executed from memory in Provence sometime after de Staël's return to France towards the end of September 1953. The unique and specific dating of this work may well indicate that it was one that de Staël found, on its completion, to be especially evocative of the precise atmosphere of Agrigento at the time when he had visited it.
In the summer of 1953 de Staël, recently returned from a triumphant
exhibition in New York where he had been lauded as the leading
European artist of his generation, set off with his wife, family and two friends on a tour of Sicily and Southern Italy. On their return to Southern France a month or so later, de Staël began a series of paintings inspired by the raw and radiant Sicilian landscape he had seen and sketched around the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Agrigento. This ancient landscape with its magnificent 6th Century B.C. ruins became a central, almost icon-like motif in de Staëls work over the ensuing months, providing the inspiration for a series of over twenty paintings that, on their completion, were immediately recognised as being among the very greatest of all the artist's achievements.
Agrigente was painted in the warmth and light of the South of France and it is this sense, the very essence of the Mediterranean that is distilled into his painting. The climate, light, colour and coastal landscape of the Mediterranean combined with its ancient cultural history all proved vital to pushing de Staëls pure way of painting to further intensifications than those previously seen in his work. De Staëls Agrigente paintings are works that both heroify the rich, intensified colours of the Mediterranean as well as concretise them - through an emphasis on their material texture - into intense but refined and perfectly balanced painterly constructions. As the collector and critic Douglas Cooper who befriended de Staël when he became a neighbour in Provence on his return from Italy in 1953 recalled of these works, de Staël was 'a master at reducing things to essentials ... Being a very fine painter, as well as a painter who loved broad effects, he could manage with a few carefully chosen shapes and subtle tonalities... to convey an extraordinarily full visual experience' (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 73).
BETWEEN FIGURATION AND ABSTRACTION
In Agrigente de Staël has realised his composition using rich swathes of pure, thick, oil colour generously applied with a palette knife and magically organised into dynamically intersecting but ultimately coherent structures. This vibrant and epic landscape marks the painterly culmination of a unique adventure into the fusion of abstraction and figuration that de Staël first embarked upon in Paris two years earlier. As he wrote to his friend Jacques Dubourg from Rome shortly after visiting Sicily, along with some antiquities in the Musée du Syracuse, his visit to Agrigento had proved the 'highpoint' of his entire summer.
This 'highpoint' was to act as the catalyst through which many of the various themes and ideas that had been running through his work to date were to came to fruition. Reminiscent in some respects of the colour-intensified abstracting of landscape formerly pioneered by his fellow Russian artists Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexei von Jawlensky, de Staëls Agrigente paintings fuse Mediterranean light with the Northern European landscape tradition, the rich colours and simplified forms of Russian icon painting with the dynamic colourism of Henri Matisse's cut-outs. Dramatizing and simplifying colour, form, material texture and an innate sensibility towards landscape, they are works that are rivaled only by the contemporary art being made on the other side of the Atlantic by another Russian-born émigré and 'heroifier' of colour: Mark Rothko.
As if to emphasize the importance of this painterly netherworld between abstraction and figuration, Agrigente is a work, like several from the series, in which de Staëls focused consideration of the vast twin abstract planes of the Sicillian landscape and Mediterranean sky have been emphasized to a startling degree. Here the hills of Agrigento and the sea have been compressed into a central strip of radiant and vibrating form between the two dominant planes of blue and yellow. As a way of emphasizing the simplicity of this design and the pleasure de Staël takes in the material nature of his painterly craft, these two dominating planes of contrasting flat colour have been made with bold, broad stokes of the palette knife. In the case of the sky, de Staël has laid it across the canvas in long canvas-width horizontal pulls of thick blue paint allowing the rifts between them to leave striated horizontal ridges of paint that encourage a sense of perspectival distance. By contrast, the hot yellow plain beneath the clear sky is plastered in thick angular slabs of yellow paint that materially build a solid sense of impermeable colour and to such a degree that its intensity seems to radiate like a heatwave rising above the plain.
THE INFLUENCE OF MATISSE
In 1953 de Staël went to see the first exhibition devoted solely to Matisse's cut- outs then on show at Heinz Bergruen et Cie. In response to seeing this exhibition, de Staël too began to work with paper cut-outs, using rough shapes of starkly contrasting coloured paper to create an intriguing series of powerful and often landscape-like abstractions. These works are clearly echoed in the autonomous blocks of colour used as 'repoussoirs' in paintings such as Agrigente. Something of the colour simplification and raw power of both Matisse's cut-outs and those de Staël himself began making at this time, informs the language of colour, material texture and form of the Agrigente pictures. Indeed, in these works, despite the less dense nature of their surfaces compared to some of de Staël's earlier abstractions, the artist has pushed his mastery of the palette knife to its furthest extreme. Not long after these works were made, de Staël would finally abandon the knife to return to the brush.
In paintings like Agrigente pure blocks of colour become the freeform driving forces of the composition, the landscape being literally carved out with a simplified elegance reminiscent of Matisse's The Snail (1953) and Memory of Oceania (1952-1953). Without any preparatory drawing, de Staël established each form on the empty white plane of the blank canvas with an apparent nonchalance and immediacy, powerfully asserting the extraordinary confidence the artist held in his own mastery. Indeed, such is the artist's command of his medium and his awareness of the requirements of the composition as a whole that much of the drama and the energy of the picture appears to take place in and between these swiftly executed painterly details. The material nuances of form lie where the sweeping edge of one scraped mark meets or merges with the side of another, or where two vibrantly coloured and intuitively-swept strokes articulate a jagged and electrifying strip of raw white light in the form of the bare primed canvas.
Each of these autonomous marks asserts the impulsive, contingent sense of painterly intuition and dynamic interaction that is a hallmark of de Staël's practice. Each abstract mark asserts a vitality and independence on the canvas surface that speaks of the gestural act of painting whilst nevertheless adhering - just - to a representational function. Hovering on the very brink of abstraction, to paint like this was a delicate balancing act that de Staël suggested could induce in him a sense of 'vertigo'. 'I want my painting... to be like a tree, like a forest' he once said, '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 quoted by R. van Gindertaël, in Cimaise, no.7, June 1955, pp. 3-8).
A NEW FOUND PERSPECTIVE
As Douglas Cooper wrote, such works as this marked the culmination of a two-year period of intense and rapid development in which de Staël's painting grew ever more spectacular in its reductive power. 'Throughout the period from the summer of 1952 to the spring of 1954 de Staël's development was rapid. His pictorial invention was harnessed to a great effort, and in everything he produced one feels the force of his originality and vitality. Gradually he simplified his method of composition until, with four or five broad areas of colour he could evoke not merely the constituent elements of a landscape - sky, hills, buildings and a road for example - but even a harbour with boats, a lighthouse among the dunes, or a nude reclining on a divan. Now, in these landscapes and seascapes, de Staël often composed on the Impressionist principle of parallel planes laid out one above the other. But occasionally - as in Agrigente or La Route d'Uzès - he had recourse for the first time to a summary type of linear perspective which carries the eye back to a focus of interest generally arbitrarily placed and marked by a flurry of paint. In addition, de Staël tends to accentuate this perspective by placing in the foreground of his picture one or more repoussoirs (counterpoints) which may or may not be representational but are always strong in tonality. (D. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 62-63).
With their powerful immediacy and sense of resonant simplicity, the Agrigente paintings along with his La route d'Uzés series from this period ultimately serve as pictorial manifestos supporting de Staël's firmly-held belief that abstraction and figuration need not be opposites, but in fact complimentary. Indeed, it was precisely this refined balance between abstraction and figuration, so elegantly achieved in de Staël's paintings of 1953 and 1954 that has proved one of the artist's lasting legacies. De Staël's ability to fuse abstraction and figuration into a unique form of painting, speaking of the magic and mystery of the medium is one that was to have a profound impact in the 1950s on painters like Frank Auerbach. Like Auerbach, de Staëls magisterial command of his medium and willingness to let the autonomous plastic quality of his paint assert itself whilst performing its illusionary or figurative function, is a powerful example of the painterly play between figuration and abstraction being pursued by many 'post-modernist' painters today, not least among them artists such as Peter Doig and Gerhard Richter.' I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative' de Staël was careful to explain, '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 R. van Gindertael, Nicolas de Staël, Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 1966, translated in Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington D.C., 1990, p. 22).
As Douglas Cooper has explained, the miracle of de Staël's work at its finest, was that as in Agrigente he was somehow able to express 'delight in what he saw, and the thrill of experiencing the thousand vibrations' (to quote his own expression) to which his volatile and sensitive nature was open.' All of these were reasons, Cooper concluded, that 'to my mind, enabled Nicolas de Staël to become the most considerable, the truest and the most fascinating young painter to appear on the scene, in Europe or elsewhere, during the last twenty-five years.' (D. Cooper, op. cit., p. 7).
AGRIGENTO
With its dominating horizontal planes of cerulean blue and lemon yellow powerfully suggesting a broad expanse of land and sky, this painting, Agrigente is one of the earliest, largest and most ambitious examples of arguably the most important series by Nicolas de Staël. It is also a work that is unique among them in that de Staäl has signed, titled and dated it on its reverse: Agrigente, Août, 1953 (Agrigento, August, 1953). This is a date that refers not to the time of the painting's execution, but also to the time of de Staël's visit to Agrigento. The painting, like all the others in the series, was executed from memory in Provence sometime after de Staël's return to France towards the end of September 1953. The unique and specific dating of this work may well indicate that it was one that de Staël found, on its completion, to be especially evocative of the precise atmosphere of Agrigento at the time when he had visited it.
In the summer of 1953 de Staël, recently returned from a triumphant
exhibition in New York where he had been lauded as the leading
European artist of his generation, set off with his wife, family and two friends on a tour of Sicily and Southern Italy. On their return to Southern France a month or so later, de Staël began a series of paintings inspired by the raw and radiant Sicilian landscape he had seen and sketched around the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Agrigento. This ancient landscape with its magnificent 6th Century B.C. ruins became a central, almost icon-like motif in de Staëls work over the ensuing months, providing the inspiration for a series of over twenty paintings that, on their completion, were immediately recognised as being among the very greatest of all the artist's achievements.
Agrigente was painted in the warmth and light of the South of France and it is this sense, the very essence of the Mediterranean that is distilled into his painting. The climate, light, colour and coastal landscape of the Mediterranean combined with its ancient cultural history all proved vital to pushing de Staëls pure way of painting to further intensifications than those previously seen in his work. De Staëls Agrigente paintings are works that both heroify the rich, intensified colours of the Mediterranean as well as concretise them - through an emphasis on their material texture - into intense but refined and perfectly balanced painterly constructions. As the collector and critic Douglas Cooper who befriended de Staël when he became a neighbour in Provence on his return from Italy in 1953 recalled of these works, de Staël was 'a master at reducing things to essentials ... Being a very fine painter, as well as a painter who loved broad effects, he could manage with a few carefully chosen shapes and subtle tonalities... to convey an extraordinarily full visual experience' (D. Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, London 1961, p. 73).
BETWEEN FIGURATION AND ABSTRACTION
In Agrigente de Staël has realised his composition using rich swathes of pure, thick, oil colour generously applied with a palette knife and magically organised into dynamically intersecting but ultimately coherent structures. This vibrant and epic landscape marks the painterly culmination of a unique adventure into the fusion of abstraction and figuration that de Staël first embarked upon in Paris two years earlier. As he wrote to his friend Jacques Dubourg from Rome shortly after visiting Sicily, along with some antiquities in the Musée du Syracuse, his visit to Agrigento had proved the 'highpoint' of his entire summer.
This 'highpoint' was to act as the catalyst through which many of the various themes and ideas that had been running through his work to date were to came to fruition. Reminiscent in some respects of the colour-intensified abstracting of landscape formerly pioneered by his fellow Russian artists Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexei von Jawlensky, de Staëls Agrigente paintings fuse Mediterranean light with the Northern European landscape tradition, the rich colours and simplified forms of Russian icon painting with the dynamic colourism of Henri Matisse's cut-outs. Dramatizing and simplifying colour, form, material texture and an innate sensibility towards landscape, they are works that are rivaled only by the contemporary art being made on the other side of the Atlantic by another Russian-born émigré and 'heroifier' of colour: Mark Rothko.
As if to emphasize the importance of this painterly netherworld between abstraction and figuration, Agrigente is a work, like several from the series, in which de Staëls focused consideration of the vast twin abstract planes of the Sicillian landscape and Mediterranean sky have been emphasized to a startling degree. Here the hills of Agrigento and the sea have been compressed into a central strip of radiant and vibrating form between the two dominant planes of blue and yellow. As a way of emphasizing the simplicity of this design and the pleasure de Staël takes in the material nature of his painterly craft, these two dominating planes of contrasting flat colour have been made with bold, broad stokes of the palette knife. In the case of the sky, de Staël has laid it across the canvas in long canvas-width horizontal pulls of thick blue paint allowing the rifts between them to leave striated horizontal ridges of paint that encourage a sense of perspectival distance. By contrast, the hot yellow plain beneath the clear sky is plastered in thick angular slabs of yellow paint that materially build a solid sense of impermeable colour and to such a degree that its intensity seems to radiate like a heatwave rising above the plain.
THE INFLUENCE OF MATISSE
In 1953 de Staël went to see the first exhibition devoted solely to Matisse's cut- outs then on show at Heinz Bergruen et Cie. In response to seeing this exhibition, de Staël too began to work with paper cut-outs, using rough shapes of starkly contrasting coloured paper to create an intriguing series of powerful and often landscape-like abstractions. These works are clearly echoed in the autonomous blocks of colour used as 'repoussoirs' in paintings such as Agrigente. Something of the colour simplification and raw power of both Matisse's cut-outs and those de Staël himself began making at this time, informs the language of colour, material texture and form of the Agrigente pictures. Indeed, in these works, despite the less dense nature of their surfaces compared to some of de Staël's earlier abstractions, the artist has pushed his mastery of the palette knife to its furthest extreme. Not long after these works were made, de Staël would finally abandon the knife to return to the brush.
In paintings like Agrigente pure blocks of colour become the freeform driving forces of the composition, the landscape being literally carved out with a simplified elegance reminiscent of Matisse's The Snail (1953) and Memory of Oceania (1952-1953). Without any preparatory drawing, de Staël established each form on the empty white plane of the blank canvas with an apparent nonchalance and immediacy, powerfully asserting the extraordinary confidence the artist held in his own mastery. Indeed, such is the artist's command of his medium and his awareness of the requirements of the composition as a whole that much of the drama and the energy of the picture appears to take place in and between these swiftly executed painterly details. The material nuances of form lie where the sweeping edge of one scraped mark meets or merges with the side of another, or where two vibrantly coloured and intuitively-swept strokes articulate a jagged and electrifying strip of raw white light in the form of the bare primed canvas.
Each of these autonomous marks asserts the impulsive, contingent sense of painterly intuition and dynamic interaction that is a hallmark of de Staël's practice. Each abstract mark asserts a vitality and independence on the canvas surface that speaks of the gestural act of painting whilst nevertheless adhering - just - to a representational function. Hovering on the very brink of abstraction, to paint like this was a delicate balancing act that de Staël suggested could induce in him a sense of 'vertigo'. 'I want my painting... to be like a tree, like a forest' he once said, '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 quoted by R. van Gindertaël, in Cimaise, no.7, June 1955, pp. 3-8).
A NEW FOUND PERSPECTIVE
As Douglas Cooper wrote, such works as this marked the culmination of a two-year period of intense and rapid development in which de Staël's painting grew ever more spectacular in its reductive power. 'Throughout the period from the summer of 1952 to the spring of 1954 de Staël's development was rapid. His pictorial invention was harnessed to a great effort, and in everything he produced one feels the force of his originality and vitality. Gradually he simplified his method of composition until, with four or five broad areas of colour he could evoke not merely the constituent elements of a landscape - sky, hills, buildings and a road for example - but even a harbour with boats, a lighthouse among the dunes, or a nude reclining on a divan. Now, in these landscapes and seascapes, de Staël often composed on the Impressionist principle of parallel planes laid out one above the other. But occasionally - as in Agrigente or La Route d'Uzès - he had recourse for the first time to a summary type of linear perspective which carries the eye back to a focus of interest generally arbitrarily placed and marked by a flurry of paint. In addition, de Staël tends to accentuate this perspective by placing in the foreground of his picture one or more repoussoirs (counterpoints) which may or may not be representational but are always strong in tonality. (D. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 62-63).
With their powerful immediacy and sense of resonant simplicity, the Agrigente paintings along with his La route d'Uzés series from this period ultimately serve as pictorial manifestos supporting de Staël's firmly-held belief that abstraction and figuration need not be opposites, but in fact complimentary. Indeed, it was precisely this refined balance between abstraction and figuration, so elegantly achieved in de Staël's paintings of 1953 and 1954 that has proved one of the artist's lasting legacies. De Staël's ability to fuse abstraction and figuration into a unique form of painting, speaking of the magic and mystery of the medium is one that was to have a profound impact in the 1950s on painters like Frank Auerbach. Like Auerbach, de Staëls magisterial command of his medium and willingness to let the autonomous plastic quality of his paint assert itself whilst performing its illusionary or figurative function, is a powerful example of the painterly play between figuration and abstraction being pursued by many 'post-modernist' painters today, not least among them artists such as Peter Doig and Gerhard Richter.' I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative' de Staël was careful to explain, '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 R. van Gindertael, Nicolas de Staël, Galerie Beyeler, Basel, 1966, translated in Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat., Washington D.C., 1990, p. 22).
As Douglas Cooper has explained, the miracle of de Staël's work at its finest, was that as in Agrigente he was somehow able to express 'delight in what he saw, and the thrill of experiencing the thousand vibrations' (to quote his own expression) to which his volatile and sensitive nature was open.' All of these were reasons, Cooper concluded, that 'to my mind, enabled Nicolas de Staël to become the most considerable, the truest and the most fascinating young painter to appear on the scene, in Europe or elsewhere, during the last twenty-five years.' (D. Cooper, op. cit., p. 7).