The painter who touched the sky Richard Williams Wednesday March 16, 2005
The Guardian
A man who 'lived out his life between a series of violent extremes'... Nicolas de Staël Fifty years ago today the painter Nicolas de Staël wrote a couple of letters to friends and, leaving a vast unfinished canvas in his studio, climbed up to the roof of his rented apartment on the old ramparts of Antibes, from where, without fuss, he threw himself headfirst to his death. He was 40 years old, and on the brink of hard-earned success.
De Staël had filled the 10 weeks of his final year on earth with unceasing activity. During that short time he completed 91 canvases, including some of his best-loved pieces, among them Nu couché bleu, Le piano, Nu gris de dos, Coin d'atelier fond bleu and Le Fort-carré d'Antibes. The uncompleted 92nd, Le Concert, consists of a black grand piano and the outline of a double bass against a bright red background and seems to have been inspired by a visit to Paris a fortnight earlier, during which he attended two concerts at the Thétre Marigny, hearing the first performances in France of works by Webern and Schoenberg. He relentless output in the early weeks of 1955 can be seen to fit a pattern. Of the 1,100 paintings listed in the catalogue raisonné produced by his widow, Françoise, a few years ago, 355 were produced between 1933, when he was 20, and 1951. After that the annual rate increased rapidly, peaking with 277 canvases in 1954. He was still accelerating when he died, displaying a new transparency in works which inspired John Berger to call him "a painter who never stopped looking for the sky".
Born in St Petersburg, the son of the deputy commander of the imperial garrison, de Staël fled to Poland with his parents and two sisters in 1919. After the deaths of his father and mother, he lived in Brussels with a foster family before leaving for Paris to study painting. He idolised Braque, who reciprocated the admiration, and befriended Kandinsky and the poet René Char. But he belonged to no fashionable school, which cost him recognition.
Very tall, with an imposing face and a turbulent private life, he cut a striking figure. In the words of Douglas Cooper, the English art critic, he was "a complex and in many ways contradictory character: autocratic, exacting, exuberant, morose, charming, witty and uncompromising," a man who "lived out his life between a series of violent extremes", from the last of which there was to be no return.