Painting: A Thousand Vibrations

In the decade since his death, Nicolas de Staël has become a mythical figure m the Paris art world. His life pro vided most of the necessary romantic ingredients. He was an athletic, tall, brooding Russian aristocrat, a former Foreign Legionnaire, remotely related to the 19th century French writer Madame de Staël, and a compulsive painter. When at the age of 41 he dived out of a third-story window in the Riviera resort of Antibes, his suicide rounded out the myth.

In death, De Staël’s reputation has become well fed and well housed His work is backed by a market that will bid as much as $68,000 for a 3-ft. by 5-ft. oil. His paintings hang in the Tate the Los Angeles County Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the museums of modern art in Paris and New York. A traveling retrospective of 104 works, gathered by five museums, is currently in Boston.

To Abstraction & Back. De Staël destroyed all of his pre-World War II paintings, which, judging from a few surviving drawings, were representational. War marked his second phase, forcing his art away from nature into abstraction. It is his late paintings (see color), which combine slabs of bright paint (the thick impasto on one canvas weighs upwards of 300 bs.) with recognizable imagery, that won him international regard. The combination seemed fresh in the inbred postwar School of Paris abstraction that had reduced paint into drab pastry, a ritualistic manufacture of croûtes (crusty surfaces) that lacked the restless energy of American abstract expressionism

Personally, De Staël absorbed many shocks. His father, a Czarist cavalry general, and his mother fled the Russian Revolution only to leave him an orphan in Poland when he was eight Family friends sent him through Jesuit schools m Belgium, where he began to study art. After wartime service with the Foreign Legion in Tunisia, the demobilized artist returned to Paris with a mistress, Jeannine Guilloux. Often he painted her skeletal beauty. “I wondered what it was I had painted,” he mused, a living dead creature or a dead living creature.”

When Jeannine died in 1946, partially of malnutrition, De Staël settled into a black period that ended just as his third dealer, Jacques Dubourg, began to find an audience for his work. One of the first to herald him was Cubist Georges Braque, who announced: “De Staël has a true sense of painting.” He seemed to be tearing strips off nature, but he put them back on canvas in his brutal abstract cityscapes.

Willed Slabs. In 1952, De Staël turned the final corner in the search for a style of his own. One night he went to a soccer game played under lights. There, the hurly-burly of the action, its colliding figures, its synergetic, bright-colored jerseys convinced him that his search for visual shock must be anchored in figurative art. In a series of tiny oils, he slammed anatomies together like a deck of badly shuffled playing cards.

“One paints, under the spell of vibrations, the shock one has received,” he said. His paintings, such as his 1954 view of Marseille harbor, were made of slabs of pure color held together by will. In his Le Pont des Arts, moonlit reflection, waves, night air and solid steel are all troweled on with equal intensity.

De Staël painted the thousand vibrations that nature stirred in him until the end. Shortly before his suicide he wrote to his dealer: “I haven’t got the strength to finish my paintings.” A few days later, he began the largest canvas 13 ft. by 20 ft.) that he had ever painted. It was an attempt to translate his emotions upon hearing a concert of Schoenberg’s and Webern’s music. He never finished it.