Twenty years ago, in 2003, I published in this same section an enthusiastic article about the dazzling art of Nicolas de Staël, which was presented at the Pompidou. It explained the strong expression of surprise before an artist who denied old arguments in his painting, to affirm in the restless universe of forms the radical veracity of the work of art, with an admirable energy, moreover. I am redoing, so to speak, the sensory experience stimulated by the Russian artist during a visit to the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, woven now by a controversial proposal: figuration or abstraction?, two ways of ‘art confrontations that follow each other in the painter’s time.
A brief biographical note. Nicolas de Staël was born in Saint Petersburg, in the legendary fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, where his father, a Baltic baron, was a trusted man in the administration of the imperial family. At random, the Staël family abandoned the Bolshevik incandescence and took refuge in Poland, while the young Nicolas boldly marched to Brussels, where he attended high school and began Fine Arts in 1932. Without finishing his studies he escaped to Holland, fascinated by Rembrandt and Vermeer, and after a Mediterranean experience – Spain, Italy and North Africa – he settled in Paris, where he became familiar with the French landscape tradition: Corot, Courbet and Cézanne. But war broke out. Returning to the order, he studied with Léger and discovered Braque, a powerful influence on his formal evolution. The arrival of abstraction opened the door to the North American market, which mistakenly associated it with the chromatic lyricism of the School of Paris. But Staël’s apparent tonal blurs pointed to emotional figuration and eluded the elaborate chromatic construction.
Staël’s painting designs a diaphanous spatial adventure from scratch, as demonstrated in the present exhibition in Paris. The pictorial space is a “wall on which the birds perch freely”, an unexpected interlude that captures complementary tones and colors the perspective to be devoured by the plastic surface. And this is where the forced historicist deduction points: abstraction or figuration. At a time when the works seem abstract, the painter declares that it is a fantasy behind the visual flashes, a kind of chromatic intonation, nothing more. The shapes vividly evoke motifs from the real world, says the painter. A stratagem of the colorful environment whose material vestiges are alive and perceptible, active, in short. Powerful plans worked by subtle modulations, graphic angularities that nuance the compositional requirement. An anti-figurative manifesto, if we want to see it that way. The transfiguration of the objects in rhythmic arabesques punctuates an optimal space for plastic activity.
In the Parisian montage, decidedly abstract passages of color stand out, which, nevertheless, foreshadow the roof of a house, a fruit or perhaps a flower. A chromatic mosaic of serene beauty and sure plot of aesthetic significance. Ville Blanche, Toit s de Paris and the superb Parc des Princes are works of the fifties that evoke a well-known urban topography, motifs that recur in Les musiciens, or the “unrealized natures”, floating in geometric space like “the ashes of a burning tubular cigarette”. Magical moments of material dissolution that break “a burst of eternity”, a poetic and perhaps hesitant conclusion that impresses.
The painting that lives its own dynamic, with a complicit look and alien to the “wind of time” imagined by the gallerist friend Jeanne Bucher. The painter appears as a gifted creator of images, or perhaps he is looking for the incisive image of the world proposed by the Aquiline intuition of the artist, perhaps, now yes, too close to the provocative rigor of the School of Paris. A full-fledged testimony of Staël’s admiration for the blue Picasso, the fawn rampells or the calm visual reflection of Braque. Paradoxically, in the last canvases it seems as if the formal contours were a silent figurative longing. Matisse’s bright colors are on display. That Staël ended his life abruptly is the untimely enigma of a veiled tragedy.
Perhaps the reader will allow me an anecdote with a lesson. In the mid-eighties, I treated Anne, the painter’s eldest daughter, with a group of Catalan artists living in Paris, led by Bonell and Valls. Staël’s surrendered admiration that I gather dates from June 1931, of tourism in Barcelona and Manresa, following the traces of the Catalan Romanesque, gives rise to a confidence with Vlaminck: “The frescoes of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries are immense religiosity… impossible to describe my enthusiasm”. A sentimental Russian, no doubt.
