Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël ( born January 5, 1914 in Saint Petersburg, † March 16, 1955 in Antibes ) was a French painter Russian- Baltic origin. He was a representative of the informal painting, but soon found his own style.

Life

Nicolas de Staël was born on January 5, 1914 in St. Petersburg. After the death of both parents (father in 1921, mother 1922) in exile in Ostrow Wielkopolski, Poland, after the Russian Revolution, he grew up and his two sisters with wealthy friends of the family in Brussels. There he attended the Brussels Academy, where he already received his first awards at the age of 20 years.

After traveling to the Netherlands, France, Spain and a few times to Morocco, where he 1937 the young painter Jean Guillon Nine met, he sat down with her and her little son in Paris in 1938. 1939/40, made ​​de Staël service in the Foreign Legion in Tunisia. He then moved to Jeannine to Nice, where their daughter Anne was born in 1942. He was encouraged in Nice by Christine Boumeester and her husband Henri Goetz to abstract painting. In September 1943, returned to Paris, he soon entered the École de Paris. Jeannine died in February 1946. De Staël then married Françoise Chapouton. 1947 is the daughter of Laurence, son Jerome was born in 1948, their son Gustave in 1954.

1954 de Staël left his family and moved back to a basis of many exhibitions and related travel very exhausting year to Antibes, where he wanted to find peace by the sea. After the unsuccessful attempt to create a restart, he committed suicide on March 16, 1955, as shown in farewell letters, plagued by doubts and artistic severe depression, by jumping from the balcony of his studio in Antibes life.

Style of painting

Nicolas de Staël tried to combine abstraction with objectivity, which he (especially representatives of abstract painting ) met with many other painters rejected in many of his works. De Staël's often very large images (eg Le Concert - The Concert 350 x 600 cm ) are characterized by strong and large surface applied colors. Another image from this period is his standing act Nu debout from 1953 (Collection Nathan, Zurich ).

Today he is considered a pioneer of many younger artists. His works are highly sought after today and will appear only rarely, but then at extremely high prices on the international art market. Overall, his style is considered timeless.

Nicolas de Staël was posthumously represented by works at the documenta II (1959) and the documenta III in Kassel in 1964.