Nicolas de Staël in the Vaucluse

The painter Nicolas de Staël arrived in the Vaucluse in the summer of 1953. He rented an old silk barn from a local family at Lagnes, just below Gordes.  In 1951 he had met and become close friends with the poet Renee Char who lived at L'isle sur la Sorgue, and Char encouraged him to come to the area to paint.  De Staël was immediately taken by the light, colour and form of the valley and wrote to a friend "the infinite basin of the Vaucluse is clothed by good rocks, white marble  and a sea of green composed of three or four different woods, its amazing, the richness of this countryside".  

paysage de Vaucluse no 2 1953

paysage de Vaucluse no 3 1953

De Staël, an original and vital painter, had spent the post-war years experimenting with questions of space and colour.  He was embarking on a very productive and innovative period of his career.  He did not regard himself as an abstract painter, but rather saw himself as part of the tradition of naturalistic painters such as Constable, Corot and Courbet, whose work he admired.  He wrote,  "I do not ‘objectify’ anything that I see. I do not paint before seeing. I am not looking for anything other than painting ‘visible’ by everyone." He attempted to express his sensations of space and light by creating successive layers of coloured texture. "I need to feel life in front of me and to capture it completely as it enters my eyes and skin,"

In November 1953 he bought a beautiful chateau at Menerbes.  After a life-time of retched poverty he had begun to have some critical acclaim, particularly in America, and this enabled him to buy his family a home.

views of Menerbes 1954

In 1953 he had seen the first exhibition of Matisse's cut-outs which had a great influence on his work. He gradually simplified his method of composition until with four or five broad sweeps of colour he was able to evoke the constituant elements of a landscape. He drew and painted incessantly filling the three enormous white studios in the chateau with fresh paintings.

De Staël became friends with the english art critic and historian Douglas Cooper who lived nearby at Uzes.  Cooper, friend also to Picasso, had a substantial collection of cubist paintings which he often went to study. Some of de Staël's most powerful and dramatic paintings of this period are of the journey between Menerbes and Uzes.  He was a great draughtsman and would often stop on the journey to note down compositions for paintings to be worked up later in the studio.

series Route d'Uzes 1954

Of this work he wrote, "One never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records, with a thousand vibrations, the shock one has received, or will receive, be it the same or different"

One year after painting this series, Nicolas de Staël jumped to his death from the terrace of his studio which faced the sea at Antibes.  He was only 41 years old and in a decade of intense painting he had produced over 700 canvases.   On de Staël's death Cooper described his friend as "the truest, the most considerable and the most innately gifted painter who has appeared on the scene in Europe or elsewhere during the last 25 years." 

Ciel et Mer 1955