every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m

The curator of the exhibition, Jean-Louis Prat, focused on ten years of intense production between 1945 and 1955, when the artist was inventing a radically new pictoral language between abstract and figurative art.

The exhibition contains about 130 works, 78 paintings and 52 drawings, from private and public collections in Europe and the United States, in particular Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Henie - Onstad Art Center, Norway, Kunsthaus, Zurich, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Tate Gallery, London, The Phillips Collection, Washington and loans from the artist’s family.

All themes are rendered on both big and small canvases : nature, landscapes in Agrigente, Sicily, nudes, football-players, still lifes… giving a perfect overview on the artist’s work.

After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, Nicolas de Staël, aged 5 years and his family experienced terrible conditions during their exile in Poland. In less than one year, in 1921 and 1922, Nicolas lost both of his parents. He and his two sisters, orphans, were welcomed by a wealthy Russian family living in Brussels, Fricero. Aged ten he went to college and at the age of sixteen he was obsessed by painting and started painting.

Between 1933 and 1936 he took lessons at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and at the Academy Saint Gilles, learning antique drawing. During his studies he travelled to Holland, Spain and Morocco. In 1937 he met a young painter, Jeannine Guillou, who became his wife.
The following year Nicolas and Jeannine travelled throughout Italy, discovering the Italian early masters, but he has to admit that the old Flemish masters “are far closer to his heart”. In 1938 he worked for three weeks in Fernand Leger’s atelier.
War broke out, Nicolas de Staël was engaged at the Foreign Legion in Tunisia. He soon returned to France and joined Jeannine in September 1940 in Nice, where, two years later, Anne was born.

Exactly during this year Staël is beginning to paint works that have nothing in common with his early drawings. Influenced by Magnelli, Arp or Le Corbusier, Staël painted his first non-figurative pictures with expressive lines, geometrical forms, thick layers of dark colours. He has found his particular style. The Parisian gallery owner Jeanne Bucher draws attention to his paintings and organizes in 1944 an exhibition with works by Kandinsky, Domela and Staël. At this time the artist is living in Paris with his family, becomes a close friend of Georges Braque and exhibits for the first time in a single show at the Gallery Esquisse.
As the years of the occupation during the world war were difficult, the Staël family was suffering from hunger and cold. At the beginning of 1946 Jeanne, extremely weak, dies. His paintings now show violent strokes, often black, abstraction reveals to be deep, witness of an immoderate temper.

After 1947 the colours become lighter and the painter’s evolution more stable, favoured by his marriage with Françoise Chapouton, who will give him three children, and they moved to a spacious studio on rue Gauguet. Financial worries seem to move away, several trips to the mountains inspired him with new light. After 1950 he painted on larger canvases, colours often spread on with a knife. The constituents of the picture are not the “bars” but radiant blades, a complex of tectonic plaques that enter into contact with one another, bright and intense yellows and reds. His success at this time was due to recognition of abstract art. Staël continues to claim : “Always there is a subject, always…”. His inspiration comes from the motive, trees become vertical forms, apples isolated squares, Staël is observing nature with his experienced eye. Important exhibitions were taking place in New York, Paris and London. His works are entering the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and private and public collections in the United States and England.

In 1952 on March 26th Nicolas and Françoise were watching a football match in Paris at night in the Stadium Parc des Princes. During the following days this visual experience leads him to create 24 paintings in different sizes with the theme of football-players, exploring all visual possibilities offered by this match. He wrote in a letter to René Char: “Between heaven and earth on red or blue grass a ton of muscles perform in total self effacement ……..” Ocean blue creates a visual shock with cadmium red and gives a rhythm, white calms the violence of contrasts where vertical lines face horizontal ones. In 1953 Staël bought Le Castelet in Ménerbes, an ancient fortified country house, where he stayed until September 1954. He then moved to Antibes. His technique changes, becomes more fluid.

The painter is preoccupied with the nudes. Shrill colours reply to calm light blue colours as in “Nu couché bleu”, 1955, (Reclining Blue Nude), which somewhere still belongs to abstraction but joining figuration. In many still lifes and views of his studio he feels free to use his brush to create a variety of nuances with an outstanding beauty. “My God, how difficult life is! One has to play on all notes, play them well…” he had written to his sister. On March 16th 1955 he took his own life.

Translation/ adaptation : Martha Degiacomi

Open everyday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Vieil Arsenal

Nicolas Raboud, translation/adaptation : Martha Degiacomi


Looking at Suzanne Auber’s paintings is like listening to poetry. Thinking of stained glass windows makes us want to look at the paintings more closely. The colours and shades , even the most subtle ones , have acquired a new force. Light produces reflections, that can only be seen in dreams. In a world of dreams and hallucinations where reflected images surge, which you will always remember. Nevertheless you are not distracted, sometimes surprised but suddenly dazzled. Once you have seen one of Suzanne Auber’s paintings it is impossible to forget the feeling that you have just discovered, a new vision of a world, where colours have another value, another power than those of everyday life , whose dullness holds us in its tyranny.
Her painting is magic while keeping lucidity. She knows that her painting is dominated by clairvoyance and by a search for harmony. But this too is an adventure. It is important to let the view be guided instinctively and to refuse tricks of memory. Suzanne Auber’s spontaneity, audacity and courage make us recognize what is new, original and authentic in this painting , which has never been under any influence, unless it is the influence emanating from her strange personality, an outstanding and fascinating personality.
Philippe Soupault, translation/ adaptation: Martha Degiacomi

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