#jacques dubourg 1960

[intomore]

Jean-Paul Riopelle, 

Photographed by Jacques Dubourg, c.1960

[pwlanier]

Lot 33. Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Bouteilles (Bottles), signed 'Staël' (lower left), oil on canvas, 36 ¼ x 28 ½in. (92 x 72.4cm.) Painted in 1952. Estimate: £1,800,000 - £2,500,000. Price realised £4,519,250 © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Jacques Dubourg, Paris.

Private Collection, Nantes.

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011.

Literature: G. Dumur, 'Nicolas de Stael', in Cahiers d'art, no. 27, Paris 1952 (illustrated, p. 213).

R. V. Gindertael, Stael, Paris 1960, pl. 6 (illustrated in colour, n.p.).

J. Guichard-Meili, Nicolas de Stae¨l paintings, Paris 1966, pl. 9 (illustrated in colour).

J. Dubourg & F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, catalogue raisonné des peintures, Paris 1968, no. 421 (illustrated, p. 201).

N. de Stae¨l and J. Dubourg, Lettres a' Jacques Dubourg, London 1981, unpaged.

F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de L’oeuvre Peint, Neucha^tel 1997, no. 351 (illustrated in colour, p. 327).

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Hommage à Nicolas de Staël, 1957, no. 13.

Note: ‘A world, de Staël’s world, caught in the painting of a jug, a bottle, a piece of masonry, a landscape, a tree, an event, a nude, a portrait: whatever his subject, the fascination is complete and inescapable’ –Lucia Moholy

Featured in a stellar range of international exhibitions over the past six decades – including Nicolas de Staël: Retrospective de l’oeuvre peint at the Fondation Maeght in 1991, for which it was the catalogue’s cover image, and the major 2003 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou – Bouteilles is a magnificent work dating from Nicolas de Staël’s annus mirabilis of 1952. It is among the largest and most vibrant of a number of still-lifes depicting bottles he made during that year, which also includes Les Bouteilles, now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. In Bouteilles, five bottles in pale grey, cobalt blue and white emerge from a blazing surface of ochre, coral, ultramarine, vermillion and turquoise. Chromatic contrasts are deployed with an expert eye, heightening each hue to Fauvist levels of intensity; the greys glow like embers within a warm aura of red, while blues and oranges turn each other up to near-tropical radiance. A glimpsed underlying ground of khaki green unites the whole. De Staël has applied his paint liberally with a palette-knife, creating near-sculptural layers of impasto. The painting shifts before our eyes: it appears at once as a figurative composition and as an abstract inferno of gestural expression, the schematic bottles dissolving into a maelstrom worthy of Willem de Kooning. This majestic consolidation of abstract and figurative modes is typical of de Staël’s works of 1952, in which he fully realised his unique painterly language. In its astonishing vibrancy and assurance, Bouteilles stands as an exceptional work from the artist’s greatest period.

Courtesy of Alain Truong