“Perhaps we may define Nicolas de Staël’s itinerary as an unresolved quest for unity… Nicolas de Staël’s art remains the sign and symbol of an era. One of them, at all events: the hope for a pure lyrical vision – devoid of blemish.”
Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021
Executed in 1947, Composition is a seminal example of Nicolas de Staël’s early artistic output and his investigation into the complexities of abstraction. The present work has a distinguished exhibition history, having been included in some of the most significant retrospectives on de Staël’s work to date at museums such as Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (1972 and 1981), Tate Gallery, London (1981), Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence (1991), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1991) Musée d’Art Tobu, Tokyo (1993), Musée d'Art Moderne, Kamakura, Musée d'Art, Hiroshima, and most recently, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003) and LaM, Lille (2011-2012). Extremely rare in its large format and esteemed provenance, Composition illuminates de Staël’s ground-breaking approach to abstraction at a moment of existentialist despair across Europe after a devasting six years of war. The present work also features prominently in a photograph of de Staël in his 7 rue Gauguet studio in Paris in 1947. The painting shown in the artist’s studio to the left of the present work resides in the collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Within de Staël’s entire oeuvre of paintings, only four others were executed in the same large-scale format as the present work and only 12 paintings exist in a larger format. Comparable works executed between 1946 and 1948 remain in a number of prestigious museum collects ions, among them The Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, London, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
COMPARABLE WORKS IN MUSEUM collects IONS
The provenance of Composition speaks to the extraordinary friendship between de Staël and Georges Braque, and to the wider circle of the Parisian intelligentsia in a culturally thriving post-war Paris. After the war, Braque introduced de Staël to Father Jacques Laval, a friar in the Dominican community of the Saint-Jacques covenant in Paris. The present work remained in the collects ion of the covenant for a number of years. Father Jacques Laval was part of a long tradition of Dominican friars who were passionate about art and aesthetics, and who were deeply rooted in Parisian intellectual circles of the 1940s and ‘50s. These friars forged links with significant artists of the t.mes , including de Staël, Braque, and Serge Poliakoff, the latter of whom was also living and working in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Indeed, the work of this group of artists, as well as that of Wols, Jean Fautrier, and Jean Dubuffet from the same period denote widespread sent.mes nts of angst and anxiety, collects ively marking a moment of coming to terms with the magnitude of the war. Art historian and curator Sarah Wilson describes this atmosphere in Paris during the immediate post-war years: “Neither the humiliation of the Occupation nor the duration of hostilities and the inconceivable atrocities of mass destruction could have been anticipated. The Second World War would fundamentally change the physical fabric of Europe’s cities and their intellectual life; the Holocaust and the atomic bomb would sever the two halves of the Twentieth Century. With the collapse of any ideology of progress, the project ‘modernity’ called for redefinition; and artists in Paris would define themselves by their strategies of response” (Sarah Wilson, ‘Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Antifascism, Occupation and Postwar Paris’, in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts (and travelling), Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968, 2002, p. 236).
De Staël’s works executed in the late 1940s employ a somber colour palette, the violent passages of thickly worked pigment evocative of a certain darkness appropriate for the post-war mood. On the surface of Composition, sequences of slate blue and umber pigment are pierced by diagonal lacerations of black paint, highlighting de Staël’s highly visceral and physical gesture. As writer and philosopher Emily Grosholz wrote in her review of the 1981 de Staël exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, “The earliest paintings (1946-48) are answers to questions concerning abstraction posed not so much by de Staël himself as by the Parisian school with which he was associated. Generally, the works are crowded, kinetic and dark. The surface agitation of curved and straight lines, suggestions of shallow planes, closes back on itself, knotting and whirlpooling over a shadowy depth… Like radiation in a black box or fireflies in a jar, the trajectory of the artist’s hand and of the quick unstated object is caught in an encompassing prison of darkness in the picture frame. There is no place for the eye to rest in such thickets of spirals and skewed lines, nor is there any avenue of escape” (Emily Grosholz, ‘Nicolas de Staël’, The Hudson Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, Autumn 1981, p. 397). While the dark undertones of Composition are reminiscent of wart.mes horrors, they are also evocative of de Staël’s own personal pain; the work was executed at a moment of extreme poverty for the artist, his wife Jeannine having died in February 1946 from complications caused by malnutrition.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021
A work of extreme rarity, Composition stands out in a brief yet highly nuanced and resolved artistic career. By the t.mes
of de Staël’s tragic death by suicide in 1955, he was considered by many to be the most significant European painter to emerge in the immediate post-war years, and the last great painter of the Ecole de Paris, leaving behind a revolutionary oeuvre of painterly production and a magnificent legacy. As curator Pierre Granville explained of de Staël’s early existentialist oeuvre, “Painting is for him a life force whose groundswell is irremediably linked to the rhythms of his own seething existence. In short, it does seem impossible to detach the character of the man from his translation into painting whether by means of the palette knife or by brushes. As has already been said the two are inseparable” (Pierre Granville cited in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (and travelling) Nicolas de Staël, 1981, p. 11).