Twenty years ago, the Centre Pompidou hosted a blockbuster retrospective of Nicolas de Staël. Now, crowds are packing into Paris’s other great modern art museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne, for an equally impressive show of the tormented painter who ended his life in 1955 by jumping from his eleventh-floor terrace. It is easy to wonder at de Staël’s motivation for this leap. The cause was not commercial failure—at the time of his suicide, his painting was much in demand by collectors in both America and France. Denys Sutton, the onetime editor of Apollo and more-than-one-time contributor to The New Criterion, presented an exhibition of de Staël’s work at London’s Matthiessen Gallery in 1952, having befriended the artist two years prior. The show was a failure, but the artist’s fortunes quickly turned: he had a highly successful show in New York at the Knoedler Gallery in 1953 and another at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery in 1954. Rosenberg—a dealer with no time for painters who didn’t make money—decided to represent de Staël in America. His suicide thus came in the prime of his life and career; even the least morbid among us must wonder what prompted it. The present exhibition, Nicolas de Staël (through January 21, 2024) does not venture an explanation, but it does include his last letter, written to his dealer Jacques Dubourg in which he says that he hasn’t the strength to finish his paintings. Perhaps he was exhausted by his completion of seven hundred paintings over just a few years; perhaps he was in despair from being spurned by a woman, Jeanne Polge, whom he had fallen madly in love with and left his wife and children for.
De Staël prized clarity in art, and he recorded his hope that the “flame” burning in him would not be “quenched” before his death. Few artists have burned with as much of a “hard, gemlike flame,” to evoke Walter Pater, as did de Staël. Born in 1914 in Saint Petersburg to a Russian lieutenant general of aristocratic descent, he and his family were obliged to flee Russia in 1919 for Poland. His parents both died in 1922. Nicolas and his siblings were then sent to and raised by the Fricero family in Brussels.
De Staël studied in 1933 at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Gilles-les-Bruxelles and Belgium’s Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. A new book by his daughter Anne, Staël: du trait à la couleur (Staël: from line to color) reports that he read widely, enjoying French literature but also English poets such as Byron, whom he considered “the greatest of the English,” a view at the time more widely held on the Continent than in Britain. The Dutch masters—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and the less celebrated Hercules Seghers—were early favorites of his, along with Cézanne, Matisse, and Braque, the last of whom became a friend to de Staël. Braque was among the first to praise de Staël, and in return de Staël named him as the greatest living French painter. Delacroix served as inspiration as well, and in 1936 de Staël traveled to Morocco in part to fulfill a determination to draw and paint the region as had Delacroix. There he met Jeannine Guillou, a painter five years older than he. The exhibition includes de Staël’s drawing (ca. 1939) and oil painting (1941–42) of her; she is given a haunting, thin face that could be out of an El Greco. She was the mother of his first child, Anne, but poverty and wartime Paris wore her out—she died in February of 1946, a doom that seems foretold in de Staël’s treatment of her melancholy face.
De Staël married Françoise Chapouton in May of 1946, just three months after Jeannine’s death. The next year, the family moved into a large studio at 7 rue Gauguet in the fourteenth arrondissement. His career then began to pick up, and the Musée d’Art Moderne bought his Composition en gris et vert (1949) in 1950, a rather somber work of murky colors that contrasts with the clearer Grande composition bleue of the following year. In 1950, he found a dealer in Dubourg, who must have sensed that he had a winner in the young artist, and presented a solo show of him at the Dubourg Gallery that June. In 1951 de Staël made close friends with the poet René Char. The exhibition features copies of the book and engravings they produced.
De Staël worked so intensely from 1952 until his death three years later that it’s as if he exploded. There is no hint of gloom or despair in the pictures of these years; the paintings rather seem to celebrate the glory of light. Sutton wrote in his catalogue of the 1952 London show that “de Staël has established his faith in an intangible work, nourished by light . . . these paintings raise the spirit.” In March of that year, de Staël attended a soccer match between France and Sweden at the Parc des Princes; so inspired was he by the atmosphere of the stadium that he created a series of drawings and paintings, culminating in Parc des Princes (1952), an oil painting of white, black, green, red, and blue that, though far from figurative, gives a clear feeling for the event.
Char suggested that de Staël move to Lagnes near Avignon, and, though he returned often to 7 rue Gauguet, the artist spent much of his final years in Sicily and the south of France. “Provence seems a paradise of limitless horizons,” he wrote. The pictures painted in these climes seem most in focus when looked at from a distance. De Staël almost never portrayed human figures, and when he did, as with Seated Woman (1953), the depiction is hardly more than a suggestion rather than a full portrait. His mood appears happiest in landscapes, as in one painting from 1952 whose golden, pale blue, and white tones indicate Byzantine influence. Another landscape, also of 1952, shows what looks like a red tugboat against a blue-white horizon. Sicily, where he arrived in August 1953, was for him a revelation, and here he began to paint pictures brilliant in every sense of the word. Agrigente (1953) gives us the sense of Sicily’s blazing sun and its effect on the beach’s yellow and red sands, which de Staël also painted as violet. Back in France, he painted Marseille (1954) and Marine la nuit (1954), two highly successful and poetic visions that eloquently combine abstraction and figuration. Jeanne Polge, his unrequited love, said his passion “smothered” her. But there was nothing smothering the joyous crowds filling the Musée d’Art Moderne’s Nicolas de Staël (except for their masks).