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拍品專文
‘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
‘I know what my painting is – underneath its appearance of violence and perpetual forces at play, it is something fragile in the good, in the sublime sense – it is as fragile as love’ —N. DE STAËL
Nicolas de Staël’s Fruits (1954) is a delicate vision of a pear and two apples, arranged in a white bowl against an off-white wall and dove-grey table. The objects are conveyed with the utmost economy. In this intimate still life, de Staël demonstrates both lucid confidence and painterly restraint. The fruits’ shadows and volumes are indicated with a tranquil minimum of brushstrokes in green and sepia hue; the bowl’s flat white has a palpable weight, and the overall composition a serene, meditative balance, reminiscent of de Staël’s landscapes. This work exemplifies Douglas Cooper’s observation that ‘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).
As James Fitzsimmons wrote in 1953, ‘If nature is de Staël’s source and inspiration, he never sentimentalises or lets it do his work for him. His paintings are not only sensitive responses to light, space and mass; they exist in their own right, and their existence is secured by the artist’s passionate feeling for paint and for tensions which exist only in art – on a flat, framed surface’ (J. Fitzsimmons, ‘In Love with Paint’, in The Arts Digest, vol. 27, no. 12, March 1953, p. 16). Fruits glows with this formal eloquence, conjuring a musical interplay from both the positive and negative spaces that the fruits, bowl and horizon create on the picture plane. In his painting de Staël asserted the absolute primacy of perception, and aimed for no extrapictorial meaning. His fruit are not symbolic objects, but act as vehicles for painterly exploration, rather like Cézanne’s apples. Unlike those weighty, rounded forms, however, de Staël’s are soft presences: there is a direct expression here of the subtlety that underlies even his most paint-laden compositions. In a letter to Jacques Dubourg in the same year that Fruits was executed, de Staël wrote ‘I know what my painting is – underneath its appearance of violence and perpetual forces at play, it is something fragile in the good, in the sublime sense – it is as fragile as love’ (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, December 1954, quoted in G. Dumur, de Staël, Näfels 1975, p. 81). Tragically, de Staël would leap to his death in Antibes one year later, aged just forty-one. Plain and beautiful as a clear sky, exquisite paintings such as Fruits remain as testament to de Staël’s remarkable eye; enduring even in their fragility, they are odes to the world he saw and loved.
‘I know what my painting is – underneath its appearance of violence and perpetual forces at play, it is something fragile in the good, in the sublime sense – it is as fragile as love’ —N. DE STAËL
Nicolas de Staël’s Fruits (1954) is a delicate vision of a pear and two apples, arranged in a white bowl against an off-white wall and dove-grey table. The objects are conveyed with the utmost economy. In this intimate still life, de Staël demonstrates both lucid confidence and painterly restraint. The fruits’ shadows and volumes are indicated with a tranquil minimum of brushstrokes in green and sepia hue; the bowl’s flat white has a palpable weight, and the overall composition a serene, meditative balance, reminiscent of de Staël’s landscapes. This work exemplifies Douglas Cooper’s observation that ‘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).
As James Fitzsimmons wrote in 1953, ‘If nature is de Staël’s source and inspiration, he never sentimentalises or lets it do his work for him. His paintings are not only sensitive responses to light, space and mass; they exist in their own right, and their existence is secured by the artist’s passionate feeling for paint and for tensions which exist only in art – on a flat, framed surface’ (J. Fitzsimmons, ‘In Love with Paint’, in The Arts Digest, vol. 27, no. 12, March 1953, p. 16). Fruits glows with this formal eloquence, conjuring a musical interplay from both the positive and negative spaces that the fruits, bowl and horizon create on the picture plane. In his painting de Staël asserted the absolute primacy of perception, and aimed for no extrapictorial meaning. His fruit are not symbolic objects, but act as vehicles for painterly exploration, rather like Cézanne’s apples. Unlike those weighty, rounded forms, however, de Staël’s are soft presences: there is a direct expression here of the subtlety that underlies even his most paint-laden compositions. In a letter to Jacques Dubourg in the same year that Fruits was executed, de Staël wrote ‘I know what my painting is – underneath its appearance of violence and perpetual forces at play, it is something fragile in the good, in the sublime sense – it is as fragile as love’ (N. de Staël, letter to J. Dubourg, December 1954, quoted in G. Dumur, de Staël, Näfels 1975, p. 81). Tragically, de Staël would leap to his death in Antibes one year later, aged just forty-one. Plain and beautiful as a clear sky, exquisite paintings such as Fruits remain as testament to de Staël’s remarkable eye; enduring even in their fragility, they are odes to the world he saw and loved.