NICOLAS DE STAËL (1914-1955)
The mount Sainte-Victoire (1, 011m - 3, 316ft)
France (Provence-Alpes-Côte -d'Azur)
In La montagne Sainte-Victoire (Paysage de Sicile), en hommage à Cézanne,1954, oil on canvas
The mountain
Mont Sainte-Victoire (1,011 m-3,316ft) also called Mont Venturi is a limestone massif in the South of France, in the region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Located east of Aix-en-Provence, it has experienced international fame, due to the more than 80 works Paul Cézanne did on it. It hosts many hikers, climbers and nature lovers, and is a major element of Aix landscape.
The range of the Sainte-Victoire is 18 kilometers long and 5 kilometers from large, following a strict east-west orientation. It is located on the Bouches-du-Rhône and Var, and in the towns of Puyloubier, Saint-Antonin-sur-Bayon, Rousset, Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, Beaurecueil, Le Tholonet Vauvenargues, Saint-Marc-Jaumegarde, Pourrières, Artigues and Rians.
D 10 and D 17 (Route Cézanne) are the main roads to skirt the mountains. On the northern side, the D10 crosses the Col de Claps (530 m) and the Col des Portes (631 m). On the southern side, the D 17 walks on the Plateau de Cengle and crossed the Collet blanc de Subéroque (505 m)...
The Painter
Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. Nicolas de Staël was born Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein (Николай Владимирович Шталь фон Гольштейн) in Saint Petersbourg (Russia), into the family of a Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress. De Staël's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution ; both his father and stepmother died in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Staël was sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922).De Staël's painting career spans roughly 15 years (from 1940) and produced more than a thousand paintings. His work shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Chaim Soutine, as well as of the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers. During the 1940s and beginning in representation, de Staël moved further and further toward abstraction. Evolving his own highly distinctive and abstract style, which bears comparison with the near-contemporary American Abstract Expressionist movement, and French Tachisme, but which he developed independently of them. Typically his paintings contained block-like slabs of colour, emerging as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image. According to de Staël himself, he turned to his "abstracting" because he "found it awkward to paint an object as a likeness because of the awkwardness I felt when faced ! with the infinite multitude of coexisting objects in any single object".
De Staël's work was quickly recognized within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. However, he moved away from abstraction in his later paintings, seeking a more "French" lyrical style, returning to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) at the end of his life. His most well-known late paintings of beaches and landscapes are dominated by the sky and effects of light.
Much of de Staël's late work—in particular his thinned and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s—predicts Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop Art of the 1960s.
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