Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs)

Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955)
Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs)
signé 'Staël' (en bas à gauche); signé de nouveau, daté et titré 'PARC DES PRINCES Staël 1952' (au revers)
huile sur toile
201 x 351.5 cm.
Peint en 1952 à Paris

signed 'Staël' (lower left); signed again, dated and titled 'PARC DES PRINCES Staël 1952' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
79 1/8 x 138 3/8 in.
Painted in 1952 in Paris

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Post Lot Text
“What I am trying for is a continuous renewal, really continuous, and it is not easy. I know what my painting is beneath its appearances, its violence, its perpetual games of power. It is a fragile thing in the good, in the sublime sense. It is as fragile as love” – Nicolas de Staël
“For de Staël, painting is essentially a vital medium in which the life of forms is captured and embodied. The elements of these forms – that is to say, the contours, surfaces, colour-planes, space-defining values and other visual and tactile elements – are simultaneously the materials of his craft and its very spirit: in a word, its “poetics”. In this poetics, the problems of representation and those of abstraction are not contradictory” – Roger van der Gindertael
A symphony of colour, form and movement, Parc des Princes is one of the great masterpieces of Nicolas de Staël’s career. It was painted in 1952 and has been held in his family’s private collection since his death just three years later. Vast in scale and ambition, it represents the peak of de Staël’s achievement and a critical moment in the story of Western post-war art. The painting made its debut at the Salon de mai in 1952, and was a highlight of the most significant exhibitions of de Staël’s work over the next half-century: his first New York solo show at Knoedler Gallery in March 1953; his posthumous surveys at the Palais de Tokyo in 1956 and the Kunsthalle Bern in 1957; and his major retrospectives at Tate Modern in 1981, the Museo Reina Sofía in 1991, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2003, for whose catalogue it graced the cover.
On 26 March 1952, de Staël and his wife watched a historic football match between France and Sweden at Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium. Enthused by the spectacle of athletic vigour and saturated, floodlit colour, the artist immediately embarked on a series of twenty-five ‘footballer’ paintings. While most of these are small, intense canvases, Parc des Princes is monumental. Spanning three-and-a-half metres in width, its massive bars and planes of oil paint – teals, malachites, sky blues, reds, electric whites and rich blacks – are dragged into a mural-sized nocturne that echoes the great history paintings of Uccello, Delacroix or Géricault. Synthesising abstraction and figuration, the painting operates both as a lyrical arrangement of shapes on a flat surface and as a representation of real space. De Staël conveys the match’s soaring bodies and bright stadium with grandeur and economy, fusing the excitement of the beautiful game with the physical action of painting itself. A depiction of a modern scene in an avant-garde idiom, the painting also exists in dialogue with the art of the past, reconciling de Staël’s respect for the Old Masters with his quest for a novel form of painterly expression.
That night in March 1952 was a crucial juncture for de Staël. Having worked in an almost entirely abstract mode for much of the preceding decade, he was in the process of gradually reincorporating figuration into his paintings. The football match, with its vivid colours, roaring noise and ecstatic motion, catalysed the new language he had been moving towards. As André Chastel has observed, ‘Staël loved ... the “synesthetic” and complex moment when, in the landscape, in a match, in a concert, all kinds of scores intersect, collide, and combine’ (A. Chastel, ‘Présentation par André Chastel’, Nicolas de Staël, Paris 1968, p. 20). In a letter to his friend René Char a fortnight after the match, the artist’s excitement remained at fever pitch. ‘My dear René,’ he began, ‘Thank you for your note, you are an angel, just like the boys who play in the Parc des Princes each evening … I think of you often. When you come back we will go and watch some matches together. It’s absolutely marvellous. No one there is playing to win, except in rare moments of nervousness which cut you to the quick. Between sky and earth, on the red or blue grass, an acrobatic tonne of muscles flies in abandon, forgetting itself entirely in the paradoxical concentration that this requires. What joy! René, what joy! Anyway, I’ve put the whole French and Swedish teams to work, and a bit of progress starts to be made. If I were to find a space as big as the Rue Gauguet, I would set off on two hundred small canvases so that the colour could sing like the posters on the motorway out of Paris’ (N. de Staël, Letter to René Char, 10 April 1952, in F. de Staël, ed., Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue Raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 975).
When the poet Pierre Lecuire visited de Staël at his Rue Gauguet atelier in early April, he found a scene of heated activity. ‘His entire studio was cluttered with drafts of all sizes, inspired by this spectacle: here the captain of the French team, there the parade of players on the pitch, there the extraordinary scissor-kick of a player almost falling; everything, as if aflame, in chords of blue and red, skies, men articulated violently, localised and general movement, greens, yellows, a kind of “conquest of the air”’ (P. Lecuire, ‘Journal des années Staël’, 6 April 1952, in Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2003, p. 122). Not only far larger but also more sonorous and cooler in tone than the other ‘footballers’ canvases, Parc des Princes was likely completed after the initial burst of energy that engendered the smaller works in the series. It distils their compact verve and his multi-sensory experience of the match into a lucid, orchestral sweep of geometric form.
It was clearly not just the stadium’s tumultuous colour that delighted de Staël, but also the heroic exertion of the players, that ‘acrobatic tonne of muscles’ who together enter a Zen-like state of self-abandon and total presence when immersed in the game. Just such a duality can be said to characterise Parc des Princes, which at once depicts a subject and attains a new, musical dimension through the dance of shapes that makes up its surface. The creation of such a colossal work was an athletic performance for the artist himself, requiring great physical strength as well as an intuitive command of pictorial construction. De Staël used a huge sheet of metal in place of his usual palette knife, pulling heavy loads of paint across his canvas to produce blocks, facets and blurs of hue: a technique not unlike the ‘squeegee’ method Gerhard Richter would begin using some three decades later.
Born in St Petersburg in 1914 to an aristocratic family and forced to flee Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, de Staël led an itinerant existence from a young age. His early travels encompassed Holland, where he discovered Vermeer, Seghers, Hals and Rembrandt, and France, where he became aware of Cézanne, Matisse, Soutine and Georges Braque, who would later become a friend. By the time de Staël settled in Paris in 1938, he had received a rich art-historical education. Following a stint in the studio of Fernand Léger, his friendships with members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier and Jean Arp, encouraged his tendencies towards abstract work. He began to develop a singular technique, creating heavily built-up surfaces by applying oil paint with a palette knife. His status as a rising star was confirmed in 1944 with a group show at Galerie Jeanne Bucher, which included his work alongside that of the pioneering elder abstractionists Wassily Kandinsky and César Domela. Just as soon as he had seemingly consolidated his abstract style, however, from around 1949 de Staël began to explore figuration once more. ‘I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative’, he later explained. ‘A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space’ (N. de Staël, in J. Alvard & R. Van Gindertael, Témoignages pour l’art abstrait, Paris, Éditions Art d’aujourd’hui, 1952, unpaged).
A key point in de Staël’s journey towards the ‘footballers’ series was the large-scale canvas Les Toits (The Roofs) (1951-52, Centre Georges Pompidou), which displays a tiled landscape of blacks and greys beneath an upper half suggestive of the sky. Departing from the pure abstraction of previous works, which were often simply titled Composition, Les Toits denotative title plainly offers the work up for a figurative reading. Already, this painting sees de Staël making virtuosic use of overlaid colour: warm yellowish tones offset cooler blue-greys, while one dark ‘roof’ has a red halo such that weightless, Rothko-esque light glimmers almost impossibly from the heavy layers of paint. The pigment’s thickness both...