Nicolas de Staël - Russian-French (1914-1955)

Few have crossed more bridges to and from abstraction and figuration than the Russian-French painter and illustrator, born Nikolai Vladimirovich into the Baltic German baronial family of Staël von Holstein. Subsequent to the Fall of France, an encounter in Nice with Jean Arp, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay inspired him to create his first abstract paintings. His portraits, landscapes, and still lifes would become increasingly abstract during the 1940s, a far cry from his debut exhibition of Byzantine-style icons and watercolors merely a few years prior. Featuring block-like slabs of color created by thick impastos in different zones of color, his distinctive style vis-à-vis Mark Rothko’s was succinctly described as “blobs versus blocks”. His return to figuration in the early 1950s heralded the Bay Area Figurative Movement, whereas the color intensity in his last works prefigured the direction of contemporary painting during the 1960s, including Pop Art.