Nicolas de Staël confounded critics with his art. The 20th-century French master managed to straddle the border between the abstract and the figurative, writes Lara Marlowe.
Nicolas de Staël was one of the finest French painters of the 20th century. Though he painted for only 16 years before his suicide in 1955, he created an oeuvre of unparalleled intensity, changing style several times.
Staël is best known for straddling the border between figurative and abstract painting. He refused to be drawn into theoretical quarrels, but nonetheless thanked a museum curator for not classifying him with what he called "the abstraction gang".
"I do not oppose abstract painting to figurative painting," Staël wrote in 1952. "A painting should be both abstract and figurative at the same time: abstract as a wall, figurative as a representation of a space." At a time when contemporaries such as Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Jackson Pollock were experimenting with "action painting" and tachisme, Staël horrified advocates of abstract art by returning to an almost figurative style in the early 1950s, allowing the grey and white upper canvas of Les Toits to suggest the sky above the roofs of Paris. His compositions continued to allude to the real world, in paintings inspired by football players, music and dance concerts and the landscapes of France and Italy.
Ironically, the painter's success contributed to his suicide. His reputation as a tormented, Van Gogh-like, doomed artist prone to drink and depression has since made him more famous, says Jean-Paul Ameline, the director of the Musée national d'Art moderne in Paris. Ameline has organised the largest retrospective of Staël's work, showing 135 oil paintings and 80 drawings and lithographs at the Pompidou Centre. Staël's legend was, he says, "perhaps the only cliché he fell into, despite himself. It has sometimes prevented people from seeing his painting".
Nicolas de Staël was born in St Petersburg in 1914. His father, Vladimir, was the vice-governor of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the Czar's prison. After the Russian revolution, the aristocratic family fled to Poland, the family jewels sewn into the lining of the nanny's clothing. When their parents died, a Russophile Belgian couple adopted Nicolas and his two sisters and took them to Brussels.
An art collector friend of Staël's adoptive parents was so impressed with Nicolas's work at the Belgian Académie des Beaux Arts that he paid the young artist's way to Morocco in 1936, on the understanding Staël would send him paintings and drawings. For the first time, Staël knew the pressure of other people's expectations. Though he was dazzled by the light and colours of Morocco and worked for eight hours a day, Staël destroyed most of his efforts and sent nothing to his patron.
In a café in Marrakech, Staël met Jeannine Guillou, a French painter. She left her husband, also a painter, to live in poverty with Staël in Nice and Paris through the second World War, giving birth to their daughter, Anne, in 1942.
Three of Staël's portraits of Jeannine are in the exhibition. He painted his companion in the style of El Greco, or Picasso in his blue period. "Looking at them," he wrote of the paintings, "I asked myself: what did I paint there? A dead person who is alive, a living dead person? Little by little, I felt awkward painting something that resembled . . . So I tried to attain free expression."
For most of the 1940s, Staël's "free expression" took the form of dark, abstract paintings in autumn colours, which fill the first three rooms of the Pompidou Centre exhibition. They show Staël's method of spreading thick slabs of paint with putty knife and trowel, but leave an impression best summarised by one of the titles, La Vie dure, painted in 1946, the year Jeannine died.
Though he called Jeannine "a being who gave me everything and who still gives to me each day", Staël married Francoise Chapouton, a law student who had taught Jeannine's son English, a few months after her death. As Staël's life improved, his painting became less gloomy. In the appropriately named Calme (1949), he used for the first time broad planes of colour - the beginning of what the exhibition calls Staël's "abstract apogee". Henceforward, his canvases are luminous.
Staël cared little for titles, sometimes simply numbering his paintings for gallery showings. He often compared the canvas to a wall. An exhibition of Ravenna mosaics in 1951 inspired him to transform his assemblages of large, irregular forms into variegated, mosaic-like squares that appear to decorate a wall.
Staël broke more than a decade of fidelity to abstraction when he painted Les Toits. Like the landscapes and seascapes which followed, the painting is more suggestive than representational. "I am trying to say what I have to say with as few words as possible," Staël explained.
In 1952, Staël attended a football match at the Parc des Princes in Paris and was thrilled by the shapes, colours and movement of the players. He completed 24 small oil studies on the theme, then distilled all he had learned in a huge mural-like painting from which explicit references to sport have vanished.
That same year, Staël rented a house in the south of France, and like Matisse and the Fauves before him, revelled in the violence of its colours, as shown in Figures au bord de la mer. "After a while, the sea is red, the sky is yellow and the sands are purple," Staël wrote to his close friend, poet René Char. "I'd like to soak myself in it until the day of my death."
In 1953, Staël's first major exhibition in New York was a critical and financial triumph. "All my life I needed to think painting, to see paintings, to do painting to help me live, to free me from all the impressions, all the worries which I found no way out of other than painting," he wrote while preparing the New York exhibition. A few months later, he was smitten by Char's muse, Jeanne Mathieu, who became his mistress. She travelled with Staël, his wife and children to Sicily that summer. Staël's Sicilian canvases have been called "a paroxysm of pure colour". In September 1954, Staël left his wife and children to move to Antibes - alone. For the first time, his biographers say, he loved more than he was loved. His failed affair with Jeanne and the pressure of art galleries demanding ever more paintings plunged him into depression. During those last months in Antibes, his style changed again. For the first time, Staël abandoned the thickly sculpted paint that was his hallmark, thinning his colours down to near transparency. He painted still lifes of his studio and kitchen, sea gulls and a shimmering blue and grey rendition of the ancient fort of Antibes, where he began his last, monumental, unfinished painting, inspired by a Schönberg concert.
On March 16th, 1955, Staël wrote to his friend and art dealer in Paris, Jean Dubourg: "I don't have the strength to put the finishing touches on my paintings." That night, at the age of 41, he threw himself from the roof of his building.
Nicolas de Staël is at the Centre Georges Pompidou until June 30th. See www.centrepompidou.fr and www.fnac.com for reservations