Nicolas De Staël

Exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, 15 September 2023 - 21 January 2024

A key figure on the post-war French art scene, Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) was fascinated by the spectacles of the world and their different lights, whether he was looking at the sea, a football match or a piece of fruit on a table. Varying tirelessly between tools, techniques and formats (from the tableautin to the monumental composition), Staël liked to work on several canvases in parallel, working on them through successive superimpositions and alterations.

The catalogue for this retrospective, twenty years after the one organised by the Centre Pompidou in 2003, takes a fresh look at the artist's work, drawing on more recent thematic exhibitions that have highlighted certain little-known aspects of his career (Antibes and Le Havre in 2014, Aix-en-Provence in 2018). It features over two hundred paintings, drawings, prints and notebooks from public and private collections.

From his dark canvases of the 1940s to his luminous paintings before his untimely death in 1955, Staël's work deliberately overturns the distinction between abstraction and figuration, in the passionate pursuit of an ever denser and more concise art.