More detective work leads to Fontaine de Vaucluse...

Yet again, the blogging world brings like minds together. My trail of curiosity and detection that went from finding Elizabeth David’s house in Ménerbes to the tragic suicide of artist Nicolas de Staël in Antibes (The concert and the final painting) piqued the interest of another Francophile, Evelyn Jackson at Melanged Magic.

What was it about the music in last concert de Staël listened to in Paris that had such a galvanising, creative and ultimately tragic effect on him? Intrigued, Evelyn listened to a recording of Schoenberg's Serenade Opus 24, and read in the accompanying commentary that the central portion of the work is a sonnet by Petrarch.

‘Which sonnet was it?’ writes Evelyn. ‘Could there be a clue to why this particular piece of music 'sang' to de Staël? I spent most of the morning doing the Google thing and found that the sonnet of Schoenberg's 'Serenade' is Sonnet 217, part of Petrarch's Cantoniziere to Laura, his life-long love and Muse. It took a bit of digging, but here is the sonnet in English:

Sonnetto 217

Once I hoped, lamenting so justly
making such fervent verses heard,
that pity's warmth might be felt
in that hard heart that freezes in mid-summer:

and that the cruel cloud, that chills
and veils it, might disperse with the breeze
of my ardent voice, or others might hate her
for hiding those eyes that destroy me.

Yet I seek no pity for myself, nor hatred
for her: I do not wish it, nor is it possible
(such are my stars, and my cruel fate):

but I sing her heavenly beauty, so
that, when I'm free of this flesh, the world
will know the sweetness of my death 

‘It's one of Petrarch's later sonnets that speaks more of unrequited love and the reality that hope is gone. Laura barely knows he exists and will never love him. I think the last stanza is very telling. The poet almost looks forward to the “sweetness of my death”. Is this what compelled de Staël to take his own life? Was he following Petrarch's advice? Certainly it was well-known that de Staël suffered from bouts of despair and depression, but could the music with its core of unrequited love and death have tipped him over the edge? We'll never know for sure, of course. All this is pure speculation driven by that endless curiosity to know more of the story. But isn't it intriguing how poetry, music and great paintings melange into a story of love, life and death?’

I don’t think I can add anything to Evelyn’s words, except to say thank you very much for the determined research and pushing the story on.

In yet another illustration of how creativity always seems interconnected, the medieval Italian poet Petrarch is forever associated with Fontaine de Vaucluse – a beautiful and (out of season) a rather eerie spot that ends in a wall of rock and cold green water. It happens to be one of my favourite places in Provence and I blogged about it here, giving some of the background to the story of Petrarch’s infatuation with Laura.

The concert and the final painting

The trouble with being endlessly curious is that there's always something else you'd like to know. Perhaps curiosity is a prerequisite of being a writer, or a storyteller at least: you are searching for a coherent narrative, striving to flesh it with detail.

So when I wrote yesterday about Nicolas de Staël listening to an orchestral concert in Paris and being so affected by the music that he rushed back to his painting studio in Antibes, I realised almost as soon as I had posted that I couldn't leave it at that. What was the music that had struck him so deeply? What was the last painting he worked on so feverishly and left incomplete?

When I found out, the answer was so poignant and made sense of an image I'd seen previously without understanding its significance, that I had to come back with a postscript.

To some extent this PS is also a correction of various details in the first post. It's a given that the more research you do, the more unreliable initial sources are proved to be, and so it is with this story. For example, I found a photograph of the building in Antibes where de Staël had his studio, which cannot possibly have been on the fourth floor:

There were also suggestions that a failed love affair - "un amour d'idiot" - had contributed to his despair, rather than the disparaging critic. As for the music, it seems the artist attended two concerts in Paris: the first featured pieces by one of his favourite avant garde composers, the Austrian Anton Webern, and the second - the crucial one - was a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade for Seven Instruments and Bass Voice (op. 24).

 

The Schoenberg concert was on March 6th, 1955, and it seems that the drama of de Staël's overnight flight south to begin painting followed almost immediately by his death was just that: a dramatic myth.

If he died on March 16th, then he painted feverishly for at least a week. But when you see what he produced in that time, it's certainly possible to believe that he hardly stopped for food or rest.

His penultimate canvas was The Piano (reproduced above) which was more than two metres by one and a half metres in size. And the artist's last, unfinished work, was The Concert, a truly massive six metres by three and a half.

The artist at Le Castellet

Le Ciel Rouge, 1952

One trail always leads to another…and so my discovery that the cookery writer Elizabeth David lived for some months in a large house in Ménerbes far more associated with another famous name from the 1950s inevitably made me want out find out more about the artist Nicolas de Staël. Who was he and what brought him to Le Castellet?

As it turned out, it was a romantic, bohemian and ultimately tragic tale, all too fitting for the gothic undertones Elizabeth David had sensed in the fortified medieval manor house (post here).

Nicolas de Staël was born in 1914 into an aristocratic Russian family in St Petersburg. Five years later the family was forced into exile as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. When both their parents died in Poland, he and his two sisters were sent to Brussels. He studied in Brussels, latterly at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. In the 1930s he travelled widely, living first in Paris, then – in search of bright light - in North Africa where he first met his partner Jeannine Guillou in Morocco. At the beginning of World War II, he joined the French Foreign Legion, and fought in Tunisia.

By the end of the war he was living in Nice. During the occupation life for an impoverished immigrant was hard and he supported his sick wife, Jeannine, her son from an earlier relationship, and their daughter by working as a furniture polisher. Jeannine died in 1946, in childbirth according to some sources, or of an illness brought on by malnutrition, according to others. De Staël met Françoise Chapouton in the spring of 1946, and they married in May.

Back in Paris, de Staël acquired a studio near to Georges Braque's and the two painters became close friends. In 1950 he had a one-man exhibition in the capital and sold well to influential collectors. Success followed in Britain and the USA. Soon de Staël had a top New York dealer on his side.

He was evolving a distinctive style using thick impasto. Although he was painting non-figurative pictures, he did not consider himself an abstract painter, saying, "One does not start from nothing, and a painting is always bad if it has not been preceded by contact with nature."

Composition, 1949

                                               Parc des Sceaux, 1952

Agrigente, 1954

Painting directly from nature, de Staël applied brilliant flat colours with a minimum of detail to suggest the essence of a vista. This simplification of a scene that was nevertheless utterly recognisable was one of his biggest contributions to the development of modern painting. It seems to me to encapsulate 1950s modernism.

But however successful he became, the artist was dogged by insomnia, exhaustion and depression. “All my life, I had a need to think painting, to paint in order to liberate myself from all the impressions, all the feelings, and all the anxieties of which the only solution I know is painting,” he said.

Nu Couché Bleu, 1955

In 1953, although he kept his studio in Paris and travelled back regularly, he felt he could work best in isolation in the south of France. In what was then the run-down village of Ménerbes, he found Le Castellet up for sale. It seemed to offer the light and privacy he was searching for. But he was always drawn back to the Mediterranean, and soon found yet another studio within a stone’s throw of the harbour at Antibes. The brightness and colour of the Côte d'Azur was just beyond his fourth-floor eyrie: the harbour, beaches, Fort Carré and its constant marine traffic that featured prominently in his later works.

Sailboats at Antibes, 1954

In March 1955 he attended a symphony concert in Paris. Inspired by the music he left town immediately afterwards and raced back through the night to his studio overlooking the ramparts of the old town of Antibes, desperate to capture the images stirred in his mind by the music.

As soon as he arrived in Antibes he began work on the painting. He worked without food or sleep, like a man possessed as the paint took shape on the vast canvas. As the light failed, and further work became impossible, he walked away from the unfinished painting. He grabbed some paper and dashed off three letters, then burned his sketches for all future projects. At the window of his studio he looked out for the last time, then jumped into the rue de Revely, several floors below. Late that evening, a neighbour walking her dog found his twisted body. He had died instantly, at the age of 41.

Had the balance of his mind been disturbed by a recent meeting with a disparaging art critic? This became the accepted and enduring legend. Yet there was no question that he was commercially and critically successful, with a steady demand for new works. He had suffered much in his personal life, though, from exile to the early loss of his parents and then Jeannine. Perhaps it was all too much, and in the end, art could not compensate.

                                                  Nu Couché, 1954

His paintings are still highly desirable – perhaps more so than ever. Nicolas de Staël’s Nu Couché, painted in Ménerbes in 1954, was sold last year in Paris for €7 million, the auction record for any work of art in France in 2011.