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On the short life of Nicholas de Stael and being an artist
I’ve read a few books these past years about how you can be an artist and not be poor or broke or suffering or whatever. After reviewing Nicholas de Stael’s and other famous artists’ lives this week, I think that might be a good goal, but I’m not sure that it is true for most artists.
Let’s be clear: No one’s life is simple or easy. Even Aristotle believed in luck determining a good life. A famous Hasidic Rebbe once said to me, in the coolest Yiddish accent, after I was bemoaning about the difficulties about life and the path to God, “Whoever said it was supposed to be easy!” He died of lung cancer in his early 50s and never smoked a cigarette.
So that’s true of course for everyone. But to be an artist I think has its own difficulties. I have reviewed a lot of great artists the past two years, and I have only found a couple who are self-supporting with their art. And even they had to teach privately and other things to keep body and soul together! Why is it that tough to be an artist? Even when we “make it,” we’re worth more dead!
Well, let’s be honest. We all need food or clothing or a roof over our head more than new art. At least most of us do. Both van Gogh and famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright were buying Hokusais and other great Japanese prints instead of paying their bills, and Wright famously was thrown in the town jail for it!
It’s hard to be a real artist. You either aren’t happy with your work or you aren’t — usually — getting paid for it. So these books come up with endless ideas — teaching English as a second language in a foreign country while peddling your own American art or going to endless art fairs and other venues. I hardly know English technically, and I’m too lazy to go to endless art shows. I guess I’m screwed!
So what happened to the great Nicholas de Stael in his short life?
He was born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1914 and fled with his family to Poland — my ancestors’ homeland — in 1919. Those were not fun years in Russia — remember the great movie “Dr. Zhivago”? — and then to Belgium in 1920. His parents died in 1922, and a Brussels engineer kindly took him in. By 1932 he had entered the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Brussels. He later traveled widely in Europe and North Africa. In Holland he discovered Rembrandt and Vermeer. In Paris he discovered many of the great contemporary artists of the time, such as Cezanne, Matisse, Braque and Soutine. Then again he traveled from 1934-37 to Spain, Algiers and Morocco where he met his first wife Jeannine Guillo, also a painter. They married in 1936. He painted landscapes, still lifes and portraits of his wife at this time.
In 1944 he met and became close friends with the great Georges Braques.
In 1945 in Nice he met great abstract artists Jean Arp and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who convinced him to move his art toward pure abstraction, which he successfully did. He had an exhibition of his drawings during the German occupation of France, and in 1945 had a successful exhibition that led to critical and financial success in shows in many places including New York, and he visited our own great The Barnes Foundation selection of modern art in Merion, Pa.
Success came too late to solve some of his family financial problems, and his wife died in 1946 from malnutrition. It is hard for many of us to even imagine that! A child from the marriage survived.
He remarried soon after and had two more children. And even though success came, it came too late for him emotionally. He suffered from depression, insomnia and exhaustion and moved from Paris to the south of France and ultimately to Antibes to get away from the pressures of the Parisian art world. His dealer was pressuring him to produce endless paintings when success finally came — a mixed blessing for an artist!
After a disparaging art critic ripped him to shreds on March 16, 1955, he jumped off the balcony of his 11th floor studio to his death. He was only 41 years old. So don’t put too much on what an art critic tells you — even me! That’s pretty depressing even for me writing this — and his poor wife and three children. I just put on the Rolling Stones just to keep going!
Why did he do that? You can’t just blame the poor, even if unkind, critic; a long depression and surviving two World Wars must have been difficult and contributing factors.
What about his work? I don’t think that everybody will “get it,” but many ultimately did. His work was highly influential in the 1950s, and he tried maybe tragically and unsuccessfully to synthesize and find the ground of both abstract and objective art and what I call simply figural work.
He went from objective/figural to pure abstract and back to more abstract/figural work with football (soccer) players and jazz players (my abstract image of jazz players last week was done in honor of his original version).
Large slabs of pure color almost touch and merge with each other — whites, blues and reds predominate. It’s as if there are electrical discharges in these close touchings. They are very powerful works but seemingly very crude, and almost childlike — until one looks very closely. His return to a more objective or figural work, the bright colors and even diluted oils prefigured everything from the Bay Area painters, color field paintings and even the pop art of the 1960s! You did more than OK, Nicholas!
He peaked around 1951 and was probably confused about his work when he died. He was probably close, though, to another great synthesis of some sort when he died.
Lao Tzu said somewhere — or else I’m making it up — that “one often gives up right on the edge of real success.” I believe that’s true, but it’s often hard to believe for the artist.
Why do we do it? For whatever admiration we might get, we also get — or at least I do — ridicule, even from our most supportive friends. “Don’t lose that day job!,” etc. I don’t have a day job, I think!
What can we all learn from Nicholas’ life and death? Dare to be great — don’t give up — and seriously, if you’re really depressed get some help. De Stael often worked with palette knives and rough brushes in thick impasto layers. His work to me — another critic — has an almost violent beauty to it, like beautiful icebergs colliding. It is simple, spontaneous and childlike, but also, I believe, highly planned and intellectual.
It is thought — feeling or felt thought.
Please look up online both the details of his life and see more of his remarkable work. All his paintings were done in only 15 years, and he created almost 1,000 drawings, collages and paintings.
I’ll leave you with a final quote from this long-dead master whom I hope to see in heaven one day if we both make it there. I’m pretty sure he’s there at least, for there was much true beauty in his work. And what is beauty but an attribute of the divine?
“Throughout my life, I have needed to think about painting, see paintings and paint to help me live, to free me from all the feelings, sensations and anxieties for which I have found no other release than painting.”
Wow.
Let’s learn what we can from all the good that this genius artist produced and set aside what we all suffer from ourselves — being human.
Being a real artist is a real vocation, a true call from the divine. It has its price to pay for answering this call. But on a good day at least, it is a call worth answering.
Carry on my artist friends! And God bless you, Nicholas de Stael.
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