Selected Letters

Available in English for the first time, these letters are taken from the several hundred letters anthologised by French art historian Germain Viatte, published in 2014 by Le bruit du temps. As well as an intriguing investigation of one of the great 20th-century painters, these are also the letters of a writer. From his adolescence onwards, Nicolas de Staël developed an incisive style of his own, capturing – as in his paintings – the reality of what he saw with the intensity of pure simplicity.'Nicolas de Staël’s letters are imbued with that mixture of absolute certitude and profound doubt which is the mark of a great artist. His belief in his destiny – which arises from faith – places the bar so high that it will always be impossible to clear. … He had the premonition that the path would be long and winding before it ever broke onto a clearing. Staël is not, like Raphaël, Géricault or Seurat, a precocious genius. If he must be compared to one of his predecessors, it is impossible not to think of Van Gogh.’ – Jean Frémon‘This selection of letters begins in 1926 when de Staël was 12 years old and ends with the last letter he wrote on the day he died. De Staël wrote thousands of letters – to his adoptive parents, his wives and lovers, his children, gallery owners and dealers, poets, fellow painters and those who bought his work. They describe the course of his life from young man eagerly awaiting a cheque from a family member at a post office in Cadiz so he can buy his daily kilo of tomatoes, his wine, his newspaper, paints, canvases and sketchbooks, to the final months, when black gulls began to gather on his canvasses, bringing a darker, inky sense of foreboding to work that until then had been characterised by a boundless sense of colour and light. The letters also show the evolution of his understanding of painting, of what painting actually is, of the human cost – what part of the self must be sacrificed to it. And always he is aware of the complementary roles of language and painting. De Staël’s work, though it bears traces of figuration, is never illustrative; the writing is his illustrative tool, and his own words provide a dazzling commentary on the paintings.’ – Helen Stevenson

Nicolas de Staël was an abstract painter best known for his luminous landscapes using thick impasto. Born in St Petersburg in 1914, he was five years old when his family fled the Russian Revolution to Poland, where both his parents subsequently died of cancer. Rescued by a couple living in Brussels, de Staël went on to study fine arts, architecture and decorative arts at the Beaux-Arts and the Royal Academy of Belgium. He lived in France for most of his adult life, but also spent several years travelling in Morocco in the 1930s, and was mobilised in 1940 in the French Foreign Legion in Tunisia, where he drew maps. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, his paintings were exhibited in London, Paris, Montevideo, New York and Washington. De Staël moved to a studio in Antibes in 1954 to live closer to Jeanne Polge, his lover, who refused to leave her marriage and family. On 16 March 1955, at the height of his fame but depressed and exhausted by the intensity of his work, de Staël took his own life, aged forty-one. He was survived by his second wife, Françoise, their three young children, and the daughter from his first marriage - his first wife, the painter Jeannine Guillou, having died during her second pregnancy.