“A painting must be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space.”
—Nicolas de Staël

 

Executed during a pivotal moment in Nicolas de Staël’s oeuvre, Personnages au bord de la mer, 1952, represents the vitality and emotive fluidity that characterized the artist’s pioneering visual language. In a scene rendered in an unexpected palette of brilliant color, three figures composed of thick squares of paint stand before a seascape. This scene—composed only with a palette knife—is illustrative of the tension between figuration and abstraction that underpinned the entirety of de Staël’s career. During the early 1950s, he was attempting to coalesce these two aesthetic styles in a bold affront to a contemporaneous artistic milieu dominated by Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in Europe. Bravely turning his back on the fashionable interest in gestural abstraction, Personnages au bord de la mer exemplified his renewed painterly approach to form and color.

 

After ten years spent in the studio focused on largely abstracted compositions, 1952 witnessed a marked shift in de Staël’s practice when he began painting outdoors. The patchwork effect that characterized his earlier work was replaced with a more figurative idiom composed of impasto-rich rectangles rendered against flat planes of color. “De Staël had always maintained that he was not an abstract painter,” the art critic and friend of the artist Douglas Cooper recalled, and this new body of images was “a sign that he at last felt confident enough to take a fuller aspect of reality directly.”ⁱ As seen in Personnages au bord de la mer, these squares served a pictorial function—representing three beach-goers—and created an illusion of depth by separating the figures from the landscape behind them.

 

When de Staël first introduced recognizable forms into his work in the spring of 1952, he began by painting still lifes, a soccer match, and a jazz orchestra. In the second half of the year, with all hesitation cast aside, “one finds him painting sur le motif small landscapes—some of the most perfect, most lyrical, and freshest of all his creations,” according to Cooper.ⁱⁱ Painting in nature—sur le motif or en plein air—was a method of working that was pioneered by John Constable but became most closely associated with Impressionism. Taking up this rich art historical tradition, de Staël began depicting land- and seascapes in the Parisian suburbs of Gentilly and Rosny before travelling to Normandy and then Le Lavandou, a small seaside town in the south of France where he executed Figures, Le Lavandou, the study for the present work. Captivated by the summer light and coastline of the Mediterranean for the first time since his youth, he began to let nature more directly permeate his images.

 

“Light is simply flashing here, much more than I remembered,” the artist expressed in a letter to his gallerist Jacques Dubourg in 1952. “I will create scenes of sea, beach, taking its brightness to the edge if all goes well, and also of nocturnal shadows.”ⁱⁱⁱ The bright sun of Provence left an indelible impact on the artist’s palette, suffusing his pictures with a new radiance that signalled a departure from his muted earth tones. The vibrancy of the South of France is captured in the scarlet sky and vivid yellow sea of Personnages au bord de la mer, the intensity of the oil paint emphasized by its broad application with a palette knife. This employment of chromatic color lent his canvases, including the present work, an expressive and spontaneous quality that is reminiscent of Fauvism.

 

Though its accompanying study was executed sur le motif, the present work was painted later in 1952 in his studio in Paris. “A painting conceived outside but executed alone, one to one in the workshop, will always be more concise than the other kind,” de Staël wrote to Dubourg while in Le Lavandou. “Try to reserve a few major paintings for me, not too large, of those you like,” Dubourg replied, requesting a grouping which would include Personnages au bord de la mer.^iv These images that the artist initially conceived on a smaller scale in Provence but refined and edited in Paris are today celebrated as among the finest in his career, including Figures au bord de la mer, 1952, Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, and Le Lavandou, 1952, Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Exquisite portrayals of one of de Staël’s most enduring themes—the tranquillity of the seas—they embody the aesthetic rigor that secured his reputation as one of the most important and influential painters working in Post-War France.

 

 

 ⁱ Douglas Cooper, “Nicolas de Staël: In Memoriam,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 98, no. 638, May 1956, p. 142.

ⁱⁱ Ibid.

ⁱⁱⁱ Nicolas de Staël and Jacques Dubourg, Lettres à Jacques Dubourg, London, 1981, n.p.

^iv Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Neuchâtel, 1997, p. 131.