Lot Essay
One cannot help to compare the genius and the tragic end of Nicolas de Staël's life to that of Vincent Van Gogh. One year after painting La Route d'Uzes, de Staël jumped out of his studio window in Antibes. The tragedy took place in March 1955 when he was only forty-one years old and at the peak of his career. Although he painted for a little more than a decade, he was an immensely prolific artist leaving more than 700 paintings.
La Route d'Uzes is one of de Staël's most dramatic late paintings, embodying not only his inner feelings but also his extraordinary technique of creating a balanced composition solely with the use of colour. The foreground is dominated by a sombre black, a colour the artist was passionate about. A fleeting image of a road shaped like a triangle creates depth and verticality, juxtaposed by a horizon of pink and red landscape. The intense blue sky gives light and luminosity to the picture. The artist had visited Sicily the year before La Route d'Uzes was painted and the Southern light had a dramatic impact on his work and his state of mind. As 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". (Ex. Cat. Boston, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, de Staël, 1965.)
The surface of the canvas is saturated with arrangements of large areas of paint dragged along and worked up into blobs, creating small areas of dramatic tension at the points where diagonals and triangles clash. A balance in the painting is achieved by this reduced number of fields of colour, which de Staël created by spreading the paint with a brush, a palette knife or a piece of wood, forcing small areas of impasto to be juxtaposed with smooth areas of almost translucent paint. The patches of colour then become a landscape, a horizon line and a sky, a subject which fascinated him.
Like de Staël's life, the road in La Route d'Uzes is vibrant and full of energy. However, like his end, it disappears into the centre of the canvas and into the unknown. He was an artist that responded strongly to his surroundings and his inner psychology and state of mind are shaped and moulded into the canvas. Abstract or not, de Staël's art above all represents a never ending battle with each painting. A strictly personal relationship flourishes between the artist and the utilization of colours, the bare canvas, and the completed canvas.
La Route d'Uzes is one of de Staël's most dramatic late paintings, embodying not only his inner feelings but also his extraordinary technique of creating a balanced composition solely with the use of colour. The foreground is dominated by a sombre black, a colour the artist was passionate about. A fleeting image of a road shaped like a triangle creates depth and verticality, juxtaposed by a horizon of pink and red landscape. The intense blue sky gives light and luminosity to the picture. The artist had visited Sicily the year before La Route d'Uzes was painted and the Southern light had a dramatic impact on his work and his state of mind. As 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". (Ex. Cat. Boston, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, de Staël, 1965.)
The surface of the canvas is saturated with arrangements of large areas of paint dragged along and worked up into blobs, creating small areas of dramatic tension at the points where diagonals and triangles clash. A balance in the painting is achieved by this reduced number of fields of colour, which de Staël created by spreading the paint with a brush, a palette knife or a piece of wood, forcing small areas of impasto to be juxtaposed with smooth areas of almost translucent paint. The patches of colour then become a landscape, a horizon line and a sky, a subject which fascinated him.
Like de Staël's life, the road in La Route d'Uzes is vibrant and full of energy. However, like his end, it disappears into the centre of the canvas and into the unknown. He was an artist that responded strongly to his surroundings and his inner psychology and state of mind are shaped and moulded into the canvas. Abstract or not, de Staël's art above all represents a never ending battle with each painting. A strictly personal relationship flourishes between the artist and the utilization of colours, the bare canvas, and the completed canvas.