Word: stael
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Stael was a romantic figure, a White Russian nobleman, son of the Baron Vladimir Ivanovitch de Stael-Holstein, who was dispossessed by the revolution. He was very tall, with a booming voice, a lyrical intelligence and the manic- depressive character of so many Russians, now lethargic and broody, now consumed with febrile energy. Desperately poor most of his life, he was generous to the point of folly; when money came, he threw it away like a cavalryman on a binge. He was acutely conscious of lineage and tradition. The art of the past, one might say, became De Stael...
...painter's form, the pigment is both concrete and extremely sensitive. De Stael could give a sheet of paint, applied with a wide palette knife, the receptivity and sheen of skin, inserting gradations of color so subtle that they have no hope of showing up in reproduction. In Nice, 1954, with the simplest means -- a few bars of awning-green and two shockingly vivid shapes, a red and a black, that may signify deck chairs or possibly buildings -- he could put you right in the middle of a Mediterranean summer. Still, the punch of the image, which would otherwise...
...painting that is perhaps the star of this show is Agrigento, 1954. It is based on a Sicilian archaeological site De Stael visited, now defiled by condos and hotels but in those days a bare array of hills crowned with the vestiges of Greek temples. The picture might have degenerated into an orgy of color, with its tomato-red sky and purple patches. Instead the balance is so finely held between the colored cuts and triangles -- two orange, four lemon- yellow, three purple and so on -- that one sees how strong De Stael's formal constraints were, even when...
...Stael's paint always betokens light, even -- perhaps especially -- when, like Braque's, it is black. It shows its descent from the noble directness of touch in Manet. And there is a vast appetite for the world in it. One could wish that this show had included a few more of the paintings De Stael did of soccer players -- heraldic yet energetic blocks of primary color, moving on the floodlit field of the Parc des Princes outside Paris -- for they are the summa of his love of the physical. "On grass that is either red or blue," he wrote...
...unlucky Nicolas de Stael, last exemplar of the School of Paris, is rediscovered for the American public in a marvelous show at the Phillips Collection...