Nikolai V. Stahl von Holstein was born in Baltic barons, Russian army general and commander of the last fortress. The Revolution of 1917 forced the family of Baron run in Poland, where the parents of Nicolas died. Orphan boy took the education of a wealthy Russian family in Brussels. At age ten, he entered the Jesuit school, where he began passionately fond of painting. After training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of San Gil, Nicolas has traveled through Europe, discovering the Netherlands, Spain, Morocco, Italy. During these travels he became acquainted with avant-garde areas, is fond of primitivism, but by his own admission an artist, much closer to his heart was the old master: namely painting by Flemish and Dutch artists influenced his technique and attitude toward color.
However, the love for the classics does not interfere with Nicolas de Stael to experiment in the style of the vanguard in the Paris studio of Fernand Léger, where he works several weeks in 1938. When the war begins and the Nazis occupy the north of France, Nicolas, with his wife, artist Jeanine Guillou, moved south to Nice.
Here begins a new round of the artist: under the influence Manella, Le Corbusier and Arp, with whom he had personally met in Nice, Nicolas de Stael makes his first abstract compositions. Geometric shapes collide and break into paintings, lively dynamic strokes by as if scratched the surface. These pictures only begin plotted own original style de Stael, taking more and more distinct forms since 1945. First of all, the artist begins to work with the paint as full a matter, regardless of the plot. As for the other avant-garde, "physical" nature of the painting becomes for him more important.
Nicolas de Stael literally vyleplivaet of paint texture painting surface, "epidermis" of the picture that defines the structure of all the underlying layers. In the next ten years, a sculptural work with paint will be a central element of the artist. De Steel will go from seals to complete dissolution of colors on the surface. In 1946-1947 in his paintings predominate form of columns and rods, the outlines of which by 1949 became thicker and richer.
In the early 50-ies paint compacted even more, and epidermis paintings literally come alive from vibration lines, reminiscent of cuts and cracks, deforming the surface. In 1951 in Paris, Nicolas de Stael goes to show mosaics of Ravenna: the sparkling cubes of colored stone for him to endless possibilities of color and reflections of light, expanding space. Using a technique similar to pointillism of Georges Seurat, de Stael fragments pictorial space on two levels: physical - in the manner of applying paint - and visual. Depending on whether, if the viewer looks at the painting from afar or near, the picture is perceived as a mosaic tile, the color squares which are formed abstract forms, or a shapeless magma of color.
In the manner of mosaic blocks written and "football", a wonderful painting, born under the influence of the match between France and Sweden in Parc des Princes. De Stael begins to paint the same night and for several days finalizing a series of 24 paintings. What unites them is not only themes, but also technology: matter in motion hypnotic imagination of an artist, he articulates a form of condensation of colors and flowers attached to the dynamism, throwing dense strokes with the spatula or knife.
"Football" marks the return to figurative painting and the transition to a new stage in the processing of the surface. Since 1952 starting with "Sky in Honfleur, the artist alternates on his canvases thick solid colors with transparent, hazy air, spots of color. In landscapes of the past three years, de Stael, though deferring to the idea of painted surface Mallarme and Baudelaire's secret "correspondence" in nature between the sounds, smells and colors. The metaphor of the artist on the painting surface, "read" on several levels of meaning, "full-depth", is embodied in his paintings. "Do not judge a space on the first impression. There are small bumps completely shriveled, the smell of which gives us an impression of boundless space, whereas we can walk through the forest of Fontainebleau, panting in his air, as in a tiny attic "- de Stael wrote to his friend Pierre Lekyuiru. The depth of meaning and form - that is what excites him in the first place.
The space in his paintings is small knobs, the smell of which, rather than form, gives the impression of infinity. As remarked one of the researchers of Nicolas de Stael, the trees on his canvases, as well as Cezanne's fruit, not just the trees, and more enclosed in their form. Landscapes 1952-1955 years differ in the manner of execution and the color palette: every time plastic surfaces, saturated colors and light vary depending on whether they were shown fuzzy Normandy or sunny Sicily.
A series of landscapes inspired by the ruins of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, completes the transition to a new period of creativity, the dissolution of colors. From the dense brush strokes knife de Stael returned to the brush, painted surface is thin air and filling it with light. Matter becomes thin and transparent, artist paint dilutes essential oils, giving an ephemeral lightness outlines and shapes. A figure on the verge of abstraction, returning to his canvases, as in "Naked in Blue" (1955), which melts into a transparent veil a woman's figure takes the form of a ridge on a background of fiery red sky. Ephemeral colors evoke unsteady form, elusive as a cloud, staring at the whim of the wind, or a trace of sea foam on the sandy shore. Where would lead artist search endless ephemeral shapes and colors will remain another eternal enigma de Stael: 16 March 1955 he was thrown from the window of his studio in the town of Antibes.
Olga Yurkina, Martigny, 16.06.2010
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