Twenty years ago, 2003, I published in this same section an enthusiastic article about the dazzling art of Nicolás de Staël, which was presented at the Pompidou. He recounted the strong expression of surprise at 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 as well. I redo again, so to speak, the sensitive experience stimulated by the Russian artist in a visit to the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, now woven together by a controversial proposal: figuration or abstraction?, two opposing forms of art that they happen in the painter’s time.
In 1950, when Bernard Dorival presented Composition in the museum collection, he avoided the debatable appellation of abstraction to understand the uncomfortable formal assembly that defined the works, clear geometric figures, bright colors with curiously little attention to the world of visual appearance. For Charlotte Barat, guest curator of the exhibition, “it is a game, Staël is a master at perceiving the conscious moment of ambiguity: forms without reference.” Perhaps, she suggests, a landscape of spots of color that impose its rhythm and hint at plastic verisimilitude alien to figuration.
A brief biographical note. Nicholas de Staël was born in Saint Petersburg, in the legendary fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, where his father, a Baltic baron, was a trusted man in the administration of the imperial family. By chance, the Staël family abandoned the Bolshevik incandescence and took refuge in Poland, while the young Nicolás boldly left for 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 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 blurring pointed to emotive figuration and evaded elaborate chromatic construction.
Staël’s painting designs a diaphanous spatial adventure at its roots, as demonstrated in the present exhibition in Paris. The pictorial space is a “wall on which the birds freely pose”, an unforeseen entre-deux that traps complementary tonalities and colors the perspective to be devoured by the plastic surface. And here the forced historicist deduction points out: abstraction or figuration. In an era in which the works seem abstract, the painter declares that it is a fantasy behind visual flashes, a kind of chromatic intonation nothing more. The shapes clearly evoke motifs from the real world, the painter maintains. A stratagem of the colored environment whose material vestiges are living and perceptible, active, in short. Powerful planes worked by subtle modulations, graphic angularities that qualify the compositional demand. An anti-figurative manifesto, if we want to see it that way. The transfiguration of objects into rhythmic traceries punctuates an optimal space of plastic activity.
In the Parisian montage, decidedly abstract passages of color stand out that, however, prefigure the roof of a house, a fruit or perhaps a flower. A chromatic mosaic of serene beauty and sure weave of aesthetic significance. Ville Blanche, Toit s de Paris and the superb Parc des Princes are works from the fifties that evoke a well-known urban topography, motifs that recur in Les musiciens, or the “derealized natures”, floating in the geometric space like “the ash of a tubular cigarette in combustion”. Magical moments of material dissolution that break “a flash of eternity,” a poetic and perhaps hesitant conclusion that impresses.
Painting that lives its own dynamic, with a complicit gaze and oblivious to the “breath of time” that gallerist friend Jeanne Bucher imagined. The painter appears as a gifted creator of images, or perhaps he seeks the incisive image of the world proposed by the artist’s Aquiline intuition, perhaps, now, too close to the provocative rigor of the School of Paris. A full-fledged testimony of Staël’s admiration for the blue Picasso, the Fauve outbursts or the calm visual reflection of Braque. Paradoxically, in the last paintings it seems as if the formal contours were a quiet figurative longing. Matisse’s brilliant colors are on full 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 moral. In the mid-eighties, I treated Anne, the painter’s eldest daughter, along with a group of Catalan artists from Paris, led by Bonell and Valls. The admiration of Staël that I collect dates back to June 1931, while touring Barcelona and Manresa, in the footsteps of the Catalan Romanesque, gives rise to a confidence with Vlaminck: “The frescoes from the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries are of a religious immense…impossible to describe my enthusiasm.” A sentimental Russian, without a doubt.
