9. 9AR (25611787/3) NICOLAS DE STAËL (1914-1955) Composition 1951 signed; signed and dated 1951 on reverse oil on canvas 60 x 72.8 cm. 23 5/8 x 28 11/16 in. Provenance Mr and Mrs Arnold Maremont, Winnetka Gimpel Fils Gallery, London Private collection, Germany For sale : Christie's, London, Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 29 June 1976, lot 281 Adelaide Ross Stachelberg, New York Paul Rosenberg and Co, New York Robert and Carol Goodman, U.S.A. Sale : Christie's, London, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, 3 December 1984, lot 55 Private collection, New York Private collection, London Sale : Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 30 June 2014, lot 56 Private Collection Sale : Christie's, Paris, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 7 June 2017, lot 15 Acquired at this sale by the current owner Exhibitions Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, June-September 1990 Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum, Nicolas de Staël in America, October-December 1990, p. 79, n°17, illustrated in colour Bibliography J. Dubourg, F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue Raisonné des peintures, Paris 1968, p. 169, n°299, illustrated in black and white F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue Raisonné de l'Œuvre peint et Lettres de Nicolas de Staël, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 316, n°321, illustrated in black and white F. de Staël, M. du Bouchet, G. Viatte, Nicolas de Staël - Catalogue Raisonné of the paintings, Paris 2021, p. 286, n°321, illustrated in black and white Like a fragile breath, Nicolas de Staël's painting collects itself, allowing an infinite grace to flow from each of his works, surrendering itself to us. Born of struggles and flashes of light, his canvases are as many tears and ascents towards the light whose feverish oscillations the painter, imperious, transcribes. His works, in which there is no over-emphasis, induce a mental intimacy, caressing the secret of every painter towards his spectator: getting him to look until he sees. A place of deception and a corollary of the thickness of the pigment, Nicolas de Staël's infinite variety of brushstrokes reveals the purified stylisation of the sensitive in his art. Through the material he sculpts in light, the artist, by eliminating form without abstracting it, offers our eyes all the possibilities of a dream. Although no man is a prophet in his own country, and the fratricidal war of abstraction hardly spared him, 1951 was an important year in that his paintings were shown in major institutions (MoMA in particular). Just ten years earlier, the Galerie l'Esquisse, which was hiding a resistance network, had organised a group exhibition entitled "Peintures abstraites", featuring works by Magnelli, Domela, Kandinsky and de Staël. A few months later, in 1945, Jeanne Bucher, whose eye was never mistaken, organised a solo exhibition for him. A veritable dusting of time, these eleven years allowed Nicolas de Staël to become what he was, to constantly search for substantial allies in a wish, in a look (to use René Char's expression), while his matrix works with their ripped-open peaks were already being stripped away. In 1948, in the Journal des poètes, R. Van Gindertaël wrote: "I don't think I'm being too hasty in discovering in Nicolas de Staël's work the most important event in art today since the Picasso case". Two years later, his paintings were exhibited by Jacques Dubourg, and one of his works was acquired by the state and entered the Musée d'Art Moderne (the same museum that, in just three months, brought together 330,000 lovers of Nicolas de Staël for the sublime retrospective devoted to him at the beginning of 2024). This lordly painter, this accursed prince, soon fascinated Georges Braque, René Char (the poet in winged clogs asked the painter to illustrate a book of poems), Louis Carré, Georges Duthuit, Théodore Schempp, his studio neighbour and American dealer, who organised a major exhibition for him in his New York gallery. In June 1953, the artist received a visit from Paul Rosenberg, who asked him for exclusivity for the United States. The work we are presenting here, painted in 1951, is full of light and clay, whose layers, masonry but diffuse, are reminiscent of certain landscapes of the march to come, when his brushstrokes will lighten and figuration will once again appear. The suave chromatic palette here reveals the talent of Nicolas de Staël as a tonalist, always allowing light and cameos to emerge in an infinite range of variations (tender green, cold blue, earthy ochre and salmon pink merge in the famous Staël grey), which are torn apart in the roar of a black bulge, only to embrace each other. The caresses, the repentances, the wandering play of the brushstrokes of this painting that learned to fly are then revealed, as is the twilight beauty of a sleeping city. The mosaic of tesserae is reminiscent of the mosaics in Ravenna that the painter admired at the Musée des Monuments Français in the spring of 1951, unless they are the bluish slates of the roofs (which the painter turned to the following year in his work of the same name, kept at the Centre Pompidou). These imprints of reality, like an enclave of the unexpected and metamorphoses, are as much the recesses of the soul as those of memory. Without a moment's hesitation, Nicolas de Staël, impatient to join the wind, returned to the night from which he had come, leaving behind him a sublime Œuvre, as fragile as love.