Nicolas de Staël valuation
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.
What a work by Nicolas de Staël is worth
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Bio
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.
Braque, Dubourg and Antibes
At de Staël's first solo show, at the Galerie l'Esquisse in Paris in 1944, Braque admired the work and the two became close friends. He showed with Jeanne Bucher and then Louis Carré before moving to Jacques Dubourg, who remained his most loyal dealer. He died at Antibes in March 1955, leaving Le Concert unfinished.
The catalogue raisonné by his daughter Françoise de Staël is the reference for the paintings, and labels from Dubourg or Jeanne Bucher are good evidence of an early history. The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris gave him a retrospective in 2023.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
