Word: stael
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Some artists have all the luck; others, in the long run, have very little, and Nicolas de Stael was one of these. Born in 1914, a suicide at 41 in 1955, De Stael was practically the last painter of the School of Paris whose work had much impact on American taste, before the doctrine of U.S. national supremacy in painting took hold...
...hailed by critics like the formidable Douglas Cooper -- whose vociferous dislike of De Stael's later work contributed to the depression that caused the painter to jump from his own balcony in Antibes -- as "the most considerable, the truest and the most fascinating young painter to appear on the scene, in Europe or elsewhere, during the last 25 years." His influence was wide. Those cakes of thick pigment, those creamy, generous brushstrokes inlaid like rough marquetry over their contrasting grounds, struck many artists in the 1950s as a viable alternative to the linear, quasi-geometric abstraction that had grown...
Probably half his output ended up in U.S. collections. Yet today, if he is not quite a forgotten artist in America, De Stael is without doubt a grievously neglected one. His music went out of fashion: the suave, reflective, at times slightly too decorative appeal to the senses inherited from Matisse, the thoughtful sense of paint-substance he had learned from the artist he admired above all others, his older friend and mentor Georges Braque. And it was true that De Stael had a weakness for the charming formula that was not dispelled by his frenetic rate of production...
...Stael exhibition now on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington is the first serious attempt in a quarter-century to set him before an American public. "Nicolas de Stael in America" holds, along with a few routine pictures, some marvelous moments. There are paintings whose intelligence and sensuous pressure stop you in your tracks, images that seem all the fresher for their long spell in limbo. And the Phillips Collection is the right place for them. Its founder, Duncan Phillips, was the first American to buy De Stael in depth, and one has only to move to the other...
...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...