Nicolas de Staël (1914−1955)

Is this late studio painting by Nicolas de Staël representational or abstract? Artistic discourse in Paris in the 1950s revolved around the central issue of ‘figurative or abstract?’ The artistic climate in the post-war years had led to the emergence of a ‘deuxième abstraction’ (second abstraction), also known as ‘abstraction chaude’ (hot abstraction), which was divided into a number of tendencies, including Tachisme, Art Informel and Lyrical Abstraction. Their representatives were associated with different galleries and critics, who engaged in heated disputes with each other in the art press.1 In the eyes of some exponents of abstraction, it amounted to a betrayal when de Staël – an adherent of Lyrical Abstraction – said in 1952 that paintings by him could be both representational and non-representational.

Though born in St Petersburg in 1914, de Staël grew up in Brussels, where he attended a number of art academies. From 1938, he was based chiefly in Paris. In the south of France during the Second World War, he got to know such pioneers of abstract art as Alberto Magnelli and Robert and Sonia Delaunay and their work prompted him to embrace abstraction. After 1945, he developed a type of painting in which pigment applied in layers with the palette knife generated force fields with marked textural characteristics. […] Under pressure to produce paintings for a number of exhibitions planned for 1955, hurt by adverse responses to his work and exhausted by a crisis in his personal life, in the autumn of 1954 he withdrew to a rented studio in Antibes on the French Riviera. There he painted five studio pictures, along with a large number of still lifes and landscapes featuring the sea, before taking his own life on 16 March 1955.

In Coin d’atelier à Antibes, the interior and various work-related objects – a table, a palette, a chair,6 pots and brushes – are suggested without being precisely delineated: they merge into one another to form a complex arrangement of forms and colours in space. […] The objects, apparently no longer subject to gravity, seem in the process of being subsumed into a colour space dominated by red. This chromatic ‘apotheosis’ may be read as a homage to Henri Matisse’s L’Atelier rouge (The Red Studio), which de Staël had seen in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1953. Featuring an all-consuming red that forges two- and three-dimensional space into a single entity, Matisse’s painting ranks as a kind of manifesto. The same might be said of de Staël’s studio picture, which, by achieving a perfect balance between figuration and abstraction, both embodies the intention voiced in his ‘betrayal’ statement of 1952 […].

Source: Masterpieces Kunstmuseum Bern, Ed. Matthias Frehner / Valentina Locatelli, München: Hirmer Publishers, 2016, Cat. No 137, p. 310 (author: Tina Grüter)