Staël, Nicolas de

Staël, Nicolas de (1914-1955), French painter of Russian birth. He was born in St Petersburg into an ancient aristocratic family. After the Russian Revolution the family left Russia for Poland, where his father and mother were soon to die. He was then brought up in Belgium, studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Académie St Gilles until 1933. Although from his infancy he was an exile, de Staël remained true to his roots: he was an ebullient man, a lover of art and life, and an improbable candidate for his eventual self-inflicted fate.

De Staël joined the Foreign Legion in 1939 but was demobilized in 1940, and settled in Nice. Here he met Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, and Le Corbusier. Georges Braque introduced him to J. Dubourg, a leading Paris art-dealer, who, together with fellow gallery owner Jeanne Bucher, supported him through a period of extreme poverty. He became a French national in 1948. From 1942 until his death, he devoted himself to painting and drawing, and in 13 years painted at least 1,000 canvases, chiefly in oils. In 1949, after a period of uncertainty,he re-examined the great works of Henri Matisse; as a consequence his own paintings were transformed, and shown with a surface vibrancy which rivalled the technique of his mentor. He regarded his art as a reciprocal dialogue between past and present painters: works by other artists were a continual source of inspiration. At the same time, it seems likely that he recognized the inescapable paradox of reconciling new creativity with tradition. After 1952, disenchanted with the debate over the respective merits of abstract and representational styles, he painted vigorous landscapes and still-life compositions in a free and unrestrained manner, using pure and bright colours. In 1953 de Staël settled in the Vaucluse, not far from his old friend René Char, with whom he had collaborated on a lavish book of poems in 1952. His last days were spent in Antibes, where he committed suicide in 1955, revealing an unsuspected darker side to his nature.