Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955) was a French painter of Russian origin whose work moved restlessly between abstraction and figuration, built from thick slabs of color laid down with the palette knife.

Born in Saint Petersburg into an aristocratic family, he was forced into exile by the Russian Revolution and, orphaned young, was raised by a family in Brussels, where he later studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts.

After travels through Morocco and North Africa and years of hardship in occupied Paris, he settled into the city’s avant-garde circles, meeting Braque and the Delaunays and painting his first abstractions in the mid-1940s.

His mature style emerged around 1950, when blocks of dense, saturated color began to suggest landscapes, still lifes, and figures without ever describing them outright, footballers, jazz musicians, the Mediterranean coast.

In roughly fifteen years he produced more than a thousand works, his palette growing brighter and his compositions more spare toward the end. Increasingly burdened by the pressures of his own success, de Staël died by suicide in Antibes in 1955, at the height of his career, aged forty-one.