Nicolas de Staël
Built pictures from thick slabs of colour laid on with a knife, at the line where landscape becomes abstraction.
Nicolas de Staël was born in St Petersburg in 1914 into an aristocratic family that fled the revolution; both parents were dead by the time he was eight. He trained in Brussels, served in the Foreign Legion, and worked in Paris in poverty through the war. The mature paintings are built from thick rectangular slabs of colour applied with a palette knife, at the point where abstraction and landscape meet — the Footballers series came from a floodlit match at the Parc des Princes, and the late Sicilian and Antibes pictures reduce sea, sky and land to two or three bands. He took his own life in Antibes in 1955, at forty-one.
A short career, a finite body of work and a strong market. The paint is applied extremely thickly with a knife and the impasto peaks are structurally vulnerable, chipping and shedding under contact and poor packing, so surface condition is a first-order question. Works are frequently on board or panel as well as canvas. The catalogue raisonne is the reference and the estate is active. Drawings, ink works and collages exist and are far more numerous than the paintings. Signature is usually lower left, often simply Stael.
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