A Lyrical Colorist Rediscovered

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some artists have all the luck; others, in the long run, have very little, and Nicolas de Stael was one of these. Born in 1914, a suicide at 41 in 1955, De Stael was practically the last painter of the School of Paris whose work had much impact on American taste, before the doctrine of U.S. national supremacy in painting took hold.

He was hailed by critics like the formidable Douglas Cooper -- whose vociferous dislike of De Stael's later work contributed to the depression that caused the painter to jump from his own balcony in Antibes -- as "the most considerable, the truest and the most fascinating young painter to appear on the scene, in Europe or elsewhere, during the last 25 years." His influence was wide. Those cakes of thick pigment, those creamy, generous brushstrokes inlaid like rough marquetry over their contrasting grounds, struck many artists in the 1950s as a viable alternative to the linear, quasi-geometric abstraction that had grown out of the cubist grid. But though De Stael had a healthy effect on two or three major artists, especially the English painter Frank Auerbach, most of his imitators were insipid, and their weakness reflected on De Stael's own reputation.

Probably half his output ended up in U.S. collections. Yet today, if he is not quite a forgotten artist in America, De Stael is without doubt a grievously neglected one. His music went out of fashion: the suave, reflective, at times slightly too decorative appeal to the senses inherited from Matisse, the thoughtful sense of paint-substance he had learned from the artist he admired above all others, his older friend and mentor Georges Braque. And it was true that De Stael had a weakness for the charming formula that was not dispelled by his frenetic rate of production. In his short maturity, less than a decade from 1947 to his death, he turned out more than 1,000 pictures.

The De Stael exhibition now on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington is the first serious attempt in a quarter-century to set him before an American public. "Nicolas de Stael in America" holds, along with a few routine pictures, some marvelous moments. There are paintings whose intelligence and sensuous pressure stop you in your tracks, images that seem all the fresher for their long spell in limbo. And the Phillips Collection is the right place for them. Its founder, Duncan Phillips, was the first American to buy De Stael in depth, and one has only to move to the other floors of this beloved institution to see the context from which De Stael sprang: the Matisses, the Bonnards, the late Braques, the august but now almost extinct line of arcadian modernism.

De Stael was a romantic figure, a White Russian nobleman, son of the Baron Vladimir Ivanovitch de Stael-Holstein, who was dispossessed by the revolution. He was very tall, with a booming voice, a lyrical intelligence and the manic- depressive character of so many Russians, now lethargic and broody, now consumed with febrile energy. Desperately poor most of his life, he was generous to the point of folly; when money came, he threw it away like a cavalryman on a binge. He was acutely conscious of lineage and tradition. The art of the past, one might say, became De Stael's absent father. He began his public career as an abstract painter and backed into figuration, thus annoying a number of Parisian critics who prided themselves on their advanced taste.

At the top of the painter's form, the pigment is both concrete and extremely sensitive. De Stael could give a sheet of paint, applied with a wide palette knife, the receptivity and sheen of skin, inserting gradations of color so subtle that they have no hope of showing up in reproduction. In Nice, 1954, with the simplest means -- a few bars of awning-green and two shockingly vivid shapes, a red and a black, that may signify deck chairs or possibly buildings -- he could put you right in the middle of a Mediterranean summer. Still, the punch of the image, which would otherwise be merely schematic, is modulated by the ethereal tenderness of the paint.

De Stael's paint always betokens light, even -- perhaps especially -- when, like Braque's, it is black. It shows its descent from the noble directness of touch in Manet. And there is a vast appetite for the world in it. One could wish that this show had included a few more of the paintings De Stael did of soccer players -- heraldic yet energetic blocks of primary color, moving on the floodlit field of the Parc des Princes outside Paris -- for they are the summa of his love of the physical. "On grass that is either red or blue," he wrote to his friend the poet Rene Char, "there whirls a ton of muscle in complete disregard for self with, against all sensibilities, a great sense of presence. What joy!"

The painting that is perhaps the star of this show is Agrigento, 1954. It is based on a Sicilian archaeological site De Stael visited, now defiled by condos and hotels but in those days a bare array of hills crowned with the vestiges of Greek temples. The picture might have degenerated into an orgy of color, with its tomato-red sky and purple patches. Instead the balance is so finely held between the colored cuts and triangles -- two orange, four lemon- yellow, three purple and so on -- that one sees how strong De Stael's formal constraints were, even when he had color turned up to maximum. Braque once said, "I love the rule that corrects the emotion." The same was true of De Stael.