The vertical rise of the horizon in the pictorial space is also rooted in the hieratic frontality of Byzantine icons, part of de Staël’s native culture, which was to be reformulated in the spiritual lyricism of his last great compositions of 1954 and 1955. 

The erratic destiny of Nicolas Vladimirovich de Staël von Holstein, one of the most radical practitioners of European Art Informel and long overlooked, gave rise to an impassioned biographical literature whose tendency towards rhetoric and romanticisation ultimately caused the legacy of his work to be overshadowed by his life story. There is no lack of images for the tale of a life lived in absolute terms: childhood at the imperial court of the last Russian dynasty; adolescence in exile wandering through Europe; work as a painter around the Mediterranean; life as a penniless, déraciné Slav in France and as an artist esteemed across the Atlantic; suicide in Antibes. 

Born into an aristocratic family in Saint Petersburg in 1914, he settled in France in 1938 and was eventually naturalised. Having completed a traditional academic training, he first moved towards abstract art in 1942- 43 with a series of geometric works in pastel on paper closely influenced by a generation of masters, above all Alberto Magnelli, Jean Arp and Sonia and Robert Delaunay, with whom he took refuge in Grasse during the German occupation of Paris from 1939 to 1942. This soon led him to resolve the contradictory feelings aroused by his earlier still lifes and portraits, which were then almost entirely destroyed, and to set out on his own formal path. He first showed work in the winter of 1944 together with Wassily Kandinsky and César Domela at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher¹ in occupied Paris, where the vitality of abstract art was subjected to political surveillance by the Vichy regime. 

Previously part of a Turinese private collection and purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 2006, the untitled work of 1949 presents a grey geometric mass almost in the centre of the canvas that focuses attention on the tensions gravitating around it, the vivid patches of vermilion and the dynamic acceleration of the darker vertical volumes in petroleum green and ultramarine towards the sides. The modulation of layers and the solidity of the impasto, which reached its peak in this period before becoming lighter and more volatile as from 1953, serve to immerse the space in a uniform organic substance resting on the zinc white of the background. With alternating directions of application, the paint is repeatedly worked with a palette knife and the tip of the brush to generate a variation of texture between the areas of colour and their faint crackling. In his introduction of 1968 to the first edition of the catalogue raisonné,² André Chastel identifies a crucial stage in the acceleration of the period 1946- 49. 1949 saw the start of broad formal reorganisation with a move away from sign and abandonment of the single structural element and the expressive power of the earlier paintings. Through some lightening of the palette and the tonal orchestration of colour, the composition becomes more systematic, producing images - as in the case of the Cerruti canvas - that are now organically arranged and devoid of the dark dramatic quality to which such importance previously attached. What is lost of the earlier work is regained in terms of structure and consistency, proceeding towards greater substance through a gradual shift that was to develop further in de Staël’s work. As Pierre Courthion wrote in 1948 his introduction to the catalogue of the artist’s show in Montevideo, the first across the Atlantic: “We behold an exceptional painter who has, in his work, the very rare gift of transforming the extreme quality of substance into intuitive vision.”³ 

The space compressed on the surface creates the dimension that de Staël, like other artists of the same generation alive to its Informel vitality, drew from the existentialist aesthetic of the wall. This image, which dates back to de Staël’s memories of his childhood living inside the massive walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg, is conjured up by the plaster-like appearance and the thick overlapping layers of paint with evident cracks left visible to be found in many canvases of 1950, like the large Composition en Gris et Bleu (Composition in Grey and Blue), and also in the explicit reference of the title of Le Mur (The Wall, 1951). The vertical rise of the horizon in the pictorial space is also rooted in the hieratic frontality of Byzantine icons, part of de Staël’s native culture, which was to be reformulated in the spiritual lyricism of his last great compositions of 1954 and 1955. 

In a letter to Pierre Lecuire of 3 December1949, de Staël effectively evokes the metaphor of the wall as a paradigm of the metaphysical variation he endeavoured to achieve in painting through a long mastery of measure, over which he took the greatest care from the outset, with a view to the sublimation of pictorial space: “The pictorial space is a wall but all the birds in the world fly freely there at every depth.”⁴

Laura Cantone

¹Paris 1944. 

²Chastel, de Staël, Dubourg 1968, now in de Staël 1997.

³Courthion 1948, “Bonjour à Nicolas de Staël”, consulted in Paris 2003, p. 48 (“Nous somme devant un peintre exceptionnel qui, dans son travail, a le don très rare de transformer en vision intuitive l’extrême qualité de la substance”, my translation).

⁴Letter to Pierre Lecuire, Paris, 3 December 1949, in De Staël 1997, p. 871 (“L’espace pictural est un mur mais tous les oiseaux du monde y volent liberement. À toutes profondeurs”, my translation).