Nicolas de Staël (; January 5, 1914 – March 16, 1955), born Baron Nikolai Vladimirovich Staël von Holstein (), was a French painter of Russian origin widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the post-war period. In a career spanning just fifteen years, he produced over a thousand paintings marked by a constant evolution between abstraction and figuration, a rich use of color, and a distinctive engagement with light and texture. He also worked with lithography, engraving, collage, and drawing.
Early life
Nicolas de Staël was born on January 5, 1914, in Saint Petersburg into a family of military officers. His great-grandfather, Karl Gustav Staël von Holstein was a Baltic-German nobleman who served as a colonel in the Tsar's army; his grandfather Ivan Karlovich Staël von Holstein (1798–1868) rose to the rank of general of cavalry, serving as adjutant general to Tsar Alexander II and commanding the 2nd Cavalry Division; he was a recipient of the Order of St. George (1838), the Order of the White Eagle (1859), and the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky (1864). His father, Vladimir Ivanovich, served in the ranks of the Cossacks and the Uhlans of the Imperial Guard. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general and served as the last Imperial vice-commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg from 1908 to 1917. His wife Lubov Vladimirovna Berednikova was twenty-two years younger than her husband and came from a wealthy family with an interest in the arts; she was related to the composer Alexander Glazunov.
Like many White Russians, de Staël's family was forced into exile and left Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1919 because of the Russian Revolution. After a period of wandering, the family settled for a time in Vilnius in January 1920. His father died in 1921 and his mother the following year, after the family had moved to Poland. The orphaned Nicolas, his older sister Marina, and younger sister Olga were taken in by Ludmila von Lubimov, his mother's closest friend, who lived in France. She soon entrusted them with the Fricero family in Brussels, a wealthy family of Sardinian origin who had acquired Russian nationality in the nineteenth century when Emmanuel Fricero's father served as a naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. His wife Charlotte was president of the Red Cross. They had already taken in the descendant of another prominent Russian family.
Formation De Staël was enrolled at the Jesuit Collège Saint-Michel in Etterbeek, near Brussels, in August 1924. He was an undisciplined student with poor marks and, after repeating a year, transferred to the Collège Cardinal Mercier in Braine-l'Alleud in September 1931. There he developed a passion for French literature and Greek tragedy, and began discovering painting in museums and galleries, particularly Rubens and the Belgian contemporaries James Ensor and Permeke. His adoptive father Emmanuel Fricero, a graduate of the École Centrale Paris, hoped Nicolas would pursue engineering, but upon finishing his studies the young man turned to painting.
After visiting the Netherlands in June 1933 and discovering Flemish painting, he entered the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in October, where he studied classical drawing under . He also enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Gilles, where he took architecture courses and, from 1934 to 1935, decoration courses alongside , whom he assisted on the murals for the glass-art pavilion at the 1935 Brussels World's Fair.
He then traveled throughout Europe. In the south of France and in Paris, he discovered Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Chaïm Soutine, and Georges Braque. He continued to Spain, which he crossed by bicycle with his friend Benoît Gilsoul, taking notes and sketches along the way; from Madrid, he traveled with Emmanuel d'Hooghvorst into Andalusia. In 1936 he exhibited Byzantine-style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie in Brussels.
Morocco, Italy, Paris In Marrakech in 1937, de Staël met Jeannine Guillou, a Breton painter five years his senior from Concarneau, who was married to a Pole, Olek Teslar, and had a son, Antoine (who would later become a writer under the name ). Jeannine was already an established painter; a critic in Fez had praised her "virile and nervous" talent in 1935. Nicolas, by contrast, was still searching for his style.
In 1938, he and Jeannine traveled through Italy: Naples, Frascati, Pompeii, Paestum, Sorrento, Capri. To the Friceros he wrote: "After trying to paint for a year in this marvelous Morocco, and not having emerged covered in laurels, I can approach, see, copy Titian, El Greco, the beautiful Primitives… and if sometimes these canvases are not as close to my heart as the old Flemish masters, the Dutch, Vermeer, Rembrandt, I always learn enormously from them."Letter to Emmanuel Fricero, Naples, 15 February 1938, cited in .
That year, relations with the Friceros deteriorated; the family worried about his prospects, and Nicolas broke with Belgium, moving to Paris with Jeannine. He briefly attended the Académie Moderne of Fernand Léger and spent time copying works at the Louvre. He painted prolifically and destroyed much of what he produced; from this period only a view of the quai de la Seine survives.
In September 1939, de Staël enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. In the two months before his incorporation, he met the gallerist , who found temporary lodgings for him and Jeannine in vacant artists' studios. Jeannine had already fallen seriously ill during the summer in Concarneau. It was during this period, through 1942, that Nicolas painted the greatest number of portraits of his companion in a figurative style, including Portrait de Jeannine.
During the War On 19 January 1940, de Staël was mobilized and assigned to the map service of the French Foreign Legion at Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, then transferred to the 1er Régiment étranger de cavalerie at Sousse, Tunisia, where he updated maps for the protectorate's geographic service. He was demobilized on 19 September 1940.
He rejoined Jeannine in Nice, where he met Alberto Magnelli, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, and Robert Delaunay. It was above all through his friend, the painter , that de Staël entered these artistic circles and began orienting his work toward abstraction. Jeannine, meanwhile, had signed an exclusivity contract with a dealer on boulevard Masséna, which allowed the couple to survive as wartime food restrictions worsened.
On 22 February 1942, their daughter Anne was born. De Staël was fascinated by the child, whom he described as a "petit colosse aux yeux clairs" (little colossus with light eyes). The growing family also included Jeannine's son Antoine. The three years in Nice constituted de Staël's first real "studio" period: he began calling his paintings "compositions," drew and painted feverishly, and continued destroying as much as he created. By 1942 he was painting his first abstract canvases, with ellipses, lasso-forms, and grids animated on gray grounds.
In 1943, under the Nazi occupation, the family returned to Paris. Jeanne Bucher bought drawings from Nicolas and lent the family lodgings in the vacant hôtel particulier of architect Pierre Chareau, then in America. Through Magnelli, de Staël was introduced to César Domela, who persuaded Bucher to include him in a February 1944 exhibition alongside Domela and Wassily Kandinsky. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Lanskoy, and Jean Bazaine attended the opening, but no one bought de Staël's work.
Further exhibitions followed. At his first solo show at the Galerie l'Esquisse in May 1944, Braque expressed sincere admiration and the two painters began a close friendship that would prove one of the most important of de Staël's life. In April 1945, he had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, and in May 1945 his work was included in the first Salon de Mai and the Salon d'Automne. By 1945 his exhibitions brought critical recognition, but it came too late for Jeannine, who was gravely ill. On 20 February 1946, she was admitted to the Hôpital Baudelocque for a therapeutic abortion; she died on 27 February, weakened by years of malnutrition.
Post-war recognition (1946–1951) A few months after Jeannine's death, de Staël married , whom the couple had hired at the age of nineteen to care for Anne and Antoine. In October 1946, through his friendship with the painter André Lanskoy, de Staël signed a contract with the dealer Louis Carré, who agreed to buy all his output.
In January 1947, the family moved to a large studio at 7, rue Gauguet, near the Parc Montsouris. The space was high-ceilinged and luminous, and its light helped brighten the painter's palette. The studio was close to that of Georges Braque, and the two painters became close friends; de Staël visited Braque regularly in Paris and at Varengeville-sur-Mer, and their artistic exchange would prove significant for both. In the same building, de Staël met the American private art dealer Theodore Schempp, who began introducing his work to collectors in the United States.
His second daughter Laurence was born in April 1947 and his son Jérôme in April 1948. That same month, de Staël obtained French citizenship.By decree of 6 April 1948, reference 13357x47-75, published in the Journal officiel of 18 April 1948, p. 3841.
Dissatisfied with Louis Carré's methods, de Staël moved to the gallery of on the boulevard Haussmann, who would remain his most faithful dealer and personal supporter throughout his life. Between 1947 and 1949, de Staël's palette lightened considerably. The dense, somber compositions of the immediate post-war years gave way to works in pastel grays and silvers, notably Hommage à Piranese (1948) and Jour de fête (1949), in which the impasto grew richer and the color more delicate. He refused to align himself with any movement, and when the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris acquired Composition (les pinceaux) in March 1950, he insisted on being hung apart from the abstract group.
By 1950, de Staël was attracting international attention. Schempp sold works to important collectors including Duncan Phillips of the Phillips Collection. Leo Castelli included him in a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. His work entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. That year also saw the beginning of his friendship with the poet René Char, introduced through the critic Georges Duthuit; de Staël and Char collaborated on Poèmes de René Char, bois de Nicolas de Staël, published in 1951 with woodcuts by the painter.
The explosive years (1952–1953) The year 1952 was one of de Staël's most prolific, producing more than 240 paintings. It began with a disappointing exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in London, where the British critics largely failed to respond to his work, with the exception of John Russell and Denys Sutton.
A decisive new subject arrived on 26 March 1952, when de Staël attended the France–Sweden football match at the Parc des Princes with his wife. The experience triggered a series of paintings, , executed in vivid colors across formats ranging from small oil-on-cardboard sketches to the monumental Le Parc des Princes (200 × 350 cm), for which he used wide spatulas and a fifty-centimeter sheet of metal to build up the colors on the canvas.