2023-09-22 12:44:10
This painting by Nicolas de Staël is visible in the major retrospective devoted to him by the Museum of Modern Art in Parisfrom September 15, 2023 to January 21, 2024.
The retrospective brings together a selection of approximately 200 paintings, drawings, engravings and notebooks from numerous public and private collections, in Europe and the United States. Alongside iconic masterpieces such as the Princes Parkit presents a significant group of works rarely, if ever, exhibited, including one fifty shown for the first time in a French museum.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the successive evolutions of the artist, since his first figurative steps and his dark, material canvases from the 1940s, up to his paintings painted on the eve of his premature death in 1955. If most of his work lasts a dozen years, Staël continues to renew himself and explore new paths: his “inevitable need to break everything when the machine seems to be running too smoothly” leads him to produce a remarkably rich and complex work, “without a priori aesthetics”. Insensitive to the fashions and quarrels of his time, his work deliberately overturns the distinction between abstraction and figuration , and appears as the pursuit, carried out in an emergency, of an art that is ever more dense and concise: “life is so sad without paintings that I rush as hard as I can,” he wrote. The retrospective allows you to follow this step by step pictorial quest of rare intensity, starting with his youthful trips and his first years in Paris, then evoking his installation in Vaucluse, his famous trip to Sicily in 1953, and finally his last months in Antibes, in a workshop facing the sea.
Nicolas de Staël Agrigent (1954) Oil on canvas, Private collection / Courtesy Applicat-Prazan, Paris © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Photo Annik Wetter
Staël’s biography immediately created a myth around his art: from his exile after the Russian Revolution to his tragic suicide at the age of 41, the painter’s life has continued to influence the understanding of his work. Without neglecting this mythical dimension, the retrospective intends to stay as close as possible to Staël’s graphic and pictorial research, in order to show above all a painter at work, whether facing the landscape or in the silence of the studio. An exiled child who became a tireless traveler, the artist is fascinated by the spectacles of the world and their different lights, whether he confronts the sea, a football match, or a piece of fruit placed on a table. Tirelessly varying tools, techniques and formats (from tableautin to monumental composition), Staël likes to “start work” on several canvases in parallel, working on them by successive superpositions and alterations. Drawing plays a preponderant role in this exploration, the experimental nature of which is highlighted by a rich selection of works on paper.
Places to win!
September 29: Télémaque, by André Cardinal Destouches by the ensemble Les Ombres in Ambronay
Currently and until October 8, the Festival d’Ambronay is deploying its 44th edition in the town of Ambronay, located in the Ain department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.
44th Ambronay festival – from September 15 to October 8, 2023
The program, largely focused on ancient and baroque music, will notably allow you to hear Telemachusa musical tragedy by André Cardinal Destouches, created in 1714. It is a world recreation given by the ensemble The shadows as a culmination of the three years of residency with Ambronay and the Baroque Music Center of Versailles.
We are offering you tickets to discover this abundant score, making this opera the ideal link between Lully and Rameau…! It’s the Friday September 29 at 8:30 p.m. at the Ambronay Abbey Church.
To try to win places, click here: “ Contact the show “
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