Paul Rosenberg, New York
Dr and Mrs Hauser, New York
Sale: Christie’s, New York, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, Part II, 13 November 1985, Lot 363
Juan Pablo Molyneux, New York

Jacques Dubourg & Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures, Paris 1968, p. 339, no. 855, illustrated
Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Œuvre Peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 545, no. 857, illustrated 

“In these pictures... the impartiality of the artist’s eye and his quick intelligence are pitted against strong emotions, bold simplifications accompany daring, anti-logical conceptions of design, things seen meet with things imagined, atmosphere vies with actuality.” (Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Basel 1966)

Painted in 1954, just one year before Nicolas de Staël’s tragic suicide, Voilier shows the artist at the height of his creative powers. Widely acknowledged as his most groundbreaking and productive period, it was at this time that his potential mastery was fully realised as he abandoned the palette knife for the paint brush, tantalisingly hinting at underlying forms with all the freedom and originality of a truly abstract artist. Taking an Antibes landscape as its genesis, Voilier captures this fine balance between abstraction and figuration, depicting in abbreviated fﷺorms a sailing ship floating blissfully on the water, the comple♌x view distilled into radically simplified yet communicative forms.

Fiercely individual and resistin🎶g categorization into any individual school, de Staël had a visual openness that saw him constantly evolving his style. As a figurehead of the 1940s Ecole de Paris, he explored complex geometric abstraction in muted colours and thick paint. This signature style evolved over the next decade into an interpretation of figuration with a more radiant palette, and finally settled in his final years into his sublime figurative abstractions – still lifes, nudes and landscapes.  

Primarily a painter from life, it was nature that inspired him most powerfully. Although he did not often paint en plein air, de Staël sketched compulsively, using the drawings on his return to the studio to reignite the visual luminosity of the experience and its formal characteristics. Voilier captures the radiant landscape and tranquillity of the sea with impressively simplified forms. De Staël communicates the seascape by carefully breaking down the view into the underlying geometric forms, using solely colour to create space, light and form, exploiting abstraction for its capacity to convey moods aroused in him by nature. The power of Voilier resides in the artist’s ability to capture with recourse solely to 🦩colour and form the essence 😼of an experience.

In Voilier, the composition is divided by the strong vertical of the grey sail, which draws the weight of the composition to the right. The bold highlight of yellow, captured by the strong horizontals of the horizon, draws the focus back, creating balance through a rotational symmetry of form with the dark blue of the boat. A trace of Matisse can be detected in his strong sense of colour, the simplicity of form and the refinement of his composition. Voilier attains a harmony and sense of calm that is 🍰captured so beautifully in the simplicity of the composition, and it seems impossible that so much is communicated by so little.