Selected Letters

Nicolas de Staël was an abstract painter best known for his luminous landscapes using thick impasto. Born in St Petersburg in 1914, he was five years old whenhis family fled the Russian Revolution to Poland, where both his parents subsequently died of cancer. Rescued by a couple living in Brussels, de Staël went on to study fine arts, architecture and decorative arts at the Beaux-Arts and the Royal Academy of Belgium. He lived in France for most of his adult life, but also spent several yearstravelling in Morocco in the 1930s, and was mobilised in 1940 in the French Foreign Legion in Tunisia, where he drew maps. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, his paintings were exhibited in London, Paris, Montevideo, New York and Washington. De Staël moved to a studio in Antibes in 1954 to live closer to Jeanne Polge, his lover, who refused to leave her marriage and family. On 16 March 1955, at the height of hisfame but depressed and exhausted by the intensity of his work, de Staëltook his own life, aged forty-one. He was survived by his second wife, Françoise, their three young children, and the daughter from his first marriage - his first wife, the painter Jeannine Guillou, having died during her second pregnancy.

As absorbing and fascinating as the letters of Van Gogh.’ – Richard Blin, Le Matricule des anges‘He puts his entire being into every sentence he writes, as though each one were an irrevocable act. He will do this until the very end.’ – Philippe Lançon, Libération‘A rapid, ecstatic, at times violent but resolutely poetic rhythm. The writing of Nicolas de Staël is that of urgency, of creation, emotion, and doubt.’ – Daphné Bétard, Beaux-Arts Magazine‘After having read these letters, so full are they with belief and life and tragedy, we see the colours, the skies, the rooftops painted by this hand which almost seems to move and tremble before us. A life in words and in painting.’ – Lisbeth Koutchoumoff, Le Temps‘In reading these letters, one has the feeling of being as close as possible to the creative act, through its day to day struggles, the fondness and generosity felt for loved ones, through its vertigo, nobility and its disdain for everything commercial, through its incessant desire for renewal and its “inevitable need to break everything when the machine runs too smoothly”.’ – Édith de La Héronnière, Revue des deux mondes‘To immerse yourself in [de Staël's] letters is to follow the thread of his biography: his formative years, his travels to Spain and Morocco, the visits he made to museums and to the masters (Vélasquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Courbet) and gradually learning from them the rules of drawing, composition, colour; but also his intensely passionate relationships, his family life, his friendship with Braque and René Char, his chronic financial difficulties and later, right at the end of the 1940s, the recognition, the first exhibitions and the beginning of a more comfortable material existence – this just a few years before his death aged 41. For Nicolas de Staël more than anyone else, the biography is inseparable from the work. It is as though it were in constant evolution, in search of itself.’ – Nathalie Crom, Télérama