Closer Look: Tragic Optimist
May 2008
Fifty years ago, Nicolas de Staël streaked across the School of Paris like a comet. "The most important new discovery in art since Picasso" was how one critic judged him after viewing his dark and violent abstract paintings in 1948. Though de Staël was only in his 30s, he had already used up several lifetimes: Born into the Russian nobility, he was exiled and orphaned, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in Tunisia, lived as a starving artist in occupied Paris and was now a widower with an infant. An arresting figure over 6 feet tall, brilliant and articulate, de Staël was larger than life, even in his suffering.Before his suicide in 1955, de Staël produced his life’s work during a frenetic period lasting a bare nine years. First came the abstractions, encrusted in black and gray impasto laid on with the knife. These made their American debut in April 1950 in a gallery show, "Recent French Paintings," that impressed even a skeptical New York Times. Collectors responded at once. Duncan Phillips bought two pieces and brought the French show to his museum. Lee Ault, who specialized in French masters, bought "Painting" (1947) and gave it to MoMA. Soon critic Thomas Hess was writing about de Staël’s "underground reputation in America."
Yet, just as de Staël was admitted into the pantheon, his style began to shift radically. His sensitivity to nature was rekindled, first by a trip to England, where he was awestruck by the play of light and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and second by a collaboration with René Char, the great French poet whom Albert Camus called "a tragic optimist"—a term that describes de Staël as well. His canvases morphed into luminous, lyrical suggestions of landscapes and still lifes through thickly slathered paint. Abandoning "pure" abstraction was a characteristically defiant move for the "master of grays," as his friend, the poet Pierre Lecuire, knighted him, particularly at a time when the American critic Clement Greenberg declared, "you can’t paint figuratively any more." But de Staël’s independence was untouchable, and he had the talent to pull it off. As it turned out, he got better.
Hess, reviewing his March 1953 exhibition at Knoedler & Company in New York, hailed him as "one of the few painters to emerge from postwar Paris with something personal to say and a way of saying it with authority." A few months later, art dealer Paul Rosenberg offered him exclusive U.S. representation. De Staël became obsessed by his work, leaving his family for long periods to labor in solitude, writing to Paris dealer Jacques Dubourg, a longtime friend, "I already paint ten times too much, and more as one who crushes the grapes than he who drinks the wine."
"Cathedral" (1955), one of his last works, exemplifies de Staël at his best. The inky blue-black of the night sky recedes into deep space, the perfect foil for the precarious puzzle of white rectangles occupying the center of the picture. Roughly inspired by Notre Dame in Paris, de Staël’s "Cathedral" is an imaginary house of many mansions—a charnel house, to be precise, constructed out of ghostly slabs, like white bones, with touches of red punctuating the cracks. The heavily loaded strokes of paint promise more details than they deliver when examined close up. The painting is ultimately an abstraction that no more than hints at arches, buttresses, Gothic windows. The huge mass is poised on top of a crevice that could split the whole thing asunder. Perhaps it was a premonition. On March 16, 1955, the 41-year-old artist leapt to his death from his studio terrace in Antibes. He left a note for his friend Dubourg: "I don’t have the strength to complete my paintings. Thank you for everything you have done for me." Massive stars, when they die, send off shock waves and enrich the galaxy with heavy metals, provoking the formation of new suns.
Art critic John T. Spike is currently working on a Michelangelo biography.