Nicolas de Stael - vendere e comprare opere

5 January 1914, St. Petersburg (Russia) – 16 March 1955, Antibes (France)

Nicolas de Staёl was a French painter born of an aristocratic Russian family. The Staёl family fled from Holstein to Poland in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. His father and mother died in 1921 and 1922, so that Nicolas and his two sisters grew up with wealthy Russian family friends in Brussels. De Staёl was well-educated and attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Numerous periods spent abroad in Holland, Spain, France and Morocco and Algeria inspired the young artist’s early work. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, Soutine, El Greco, Titian, Bellini and Mantegna all fascinated him. De Staёl met his first wife, the young painter Jeannine Guillou, in Morocco in 1937. He was forced to return to Paris with Jeannine and their young son Antek due to a lack of funds in 1938. De Staёl served in the French Foreign Legion from 1939–1940 before moving with Jeannine to Nice. Here they met Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, Christine Boumeester and her husband Henri Goetz, who became Nicolas de Staёl's inspiration to paint in the abstract style.

After the birth of his daughter Anne in 1942, the family returned to Paris and de Staёl took part in his first group exhibition in the Jeanne Bucher gallery in 1944. Other exhibitors included Kandinsky. In Paris, de Staёl became friends with Braque due to the proximity of their studios. War and financial problems made this a difficult time for de Staёl and his family. De Staёl joined the Salon de Mai in 1945, enjoyed a solo exhibition with Jeanne Bucher, and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. De Staёl quickly remarried after the death of his first wife Jeannine in 1946, and had another three children with Francoise Chapouton.

That same year, 1946, saw his first successes: he signed a contract with Louis Carré and exhibited in Paris, London, New York and Washington, thus ending his financial worries. The early 1950s also marked de Staёl’s shift towards a combination of abstract and representational art. His style was particularly popular in America. A large part of his surviving works were created during the period from 1952 until his death. In 1954 Nicolas left his family and moved to Antibes where he committed suicide in March 1955 by jumping from the balcony of his studio.

De Staёl is difficult to classify as an artist. He moved from the abstract to return to the figurative in a period dominated by abstract art. He is associated with Art Informel, though his return to representational images in his later work. The impasto application of colour, clearly applied with brush and palette knife, is characteristic of his work.