Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël was born Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein (Russian: Николай Владимирович Шталь фон Гольштейн) in Saint Petersburg, into the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Staël von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his second wife, Lubov Vladimirovna Berednikova (his first wife was Olga Sakhanskaya).
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).
In the 1930s, he traveled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941–1942) and Algeria.
[3] In 1943 (during the Nazi occupation), de Staël returned to Paris with Jeannine, but the war years were extremely difficult.
In April 1945, he had a one-man exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher and in May 1945 his paintings were included in the first Salon de Mai.
In October 1946 thanks to his friendship with artist André Lanskoy (whom he met in 1944) de Staël made a contract with Louis Carré who agreed to buy all the paintings that he produced.
[6] In April 1948 his son Jerome was born,[7] also that same year in Paris he began a long friendship with German artist Johnny Friedlaender.
In 1950 Leo Castelli organized a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City that included him.
On 16 March 1955, in the wake of a disappointing meeting with disparaging art critic Douglas Cooper,[10] de Staël leapt to his death from his eleventh story studio terrace, in Antibes.
His work shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso (especially Picasso in his Blue and Rose periods), Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Chaïm Soutine, as well as of the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers.
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 painting style is characterized by a thick impasto showing traces of the brush and the palette knife, and by a division of the canvas into numerous zones of color (especially blues, reds and whites).
De Staël's 1955 painting Le Fort d'Antibes was used as the cover for the Moody Blues' 1988 album Sur la Mer.
