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Nicolas de Staël: Trauma Olympics

ON PAIN, PAINT & PATHOLOGY


Peacoats and oxfords and scarves wound around necks that swivelled from oil paint to marble in a motion trained by watching tennis matches.  Galleries, for all their endless potential for romance, didn't completely insulate against the world outside of their cream, marbled walls. There was no reverie to snatch out of a realm of ether. I had an essay due in three days and a missed phone call to take. Wispy enlightenment would have to wait.


I was looking at The Old Violin, which was, shockingly, an old violin. One surrounded by a sheaf of sheet music, a blue envelope, and a pack of cigarettes. I wanted one to peel off of the

painting and into my hand. I imagined flames from the adjacent painting of the immolation

of Jeanne D’Arc licking away from her agonised body and lighting the end. The tobacco would

be practically fossilised. The paper would dissolve like a gossamer. The smoke would offend

everyone, me included. And that's completely fine.


Composition (Red) (1950), by Nicolas de Staël
Composition (Red) (1950), Nicolas de Staël

Anne de Staël, the daughter of Nicolas de Staël, said her father would brood in the corner of his studio before suddenly rising, crossing the floor, and slashing a brush across a canvas sometimes marking multiple in one movement. Reading that in my cramped dorm room, I felt a pang of longing: to be a deity-in-miniature building your own temples, whilst reigning over a loft hazy with sun, vigour, and paint fumes. De Staël navigated S.I. Hayakawa's ladder of abstraction as easily as one goes to the bathroom in their home at midnight.


Immersing oneself in his Compositions series is having de Staël himself grab the back of

your head, guide you into the world, and hearing a voice saying This is stuff I've seen, unseen,

and repainted... Your nose a millimetre from the canvas, barely touching the mini mountain peak

of a thick, brushed chunk of ochre. The work of art, as a process and as a finality, should be

violent. de Staël's compositions don't exist to placate. They're a deliberate, impasto revolt

against prosaic phenomena and a dip into the realm that drifting souls fruitlessly waited for at the

gallery.


A mistake seen in discourse concerning the legacy of de Staël and others is the

romanticising of melancholy in art. The proliferation of sadness as an online aesthetic attests to

this. Of course, the artist may want their consumers to feel what they feel. However, it's easy to

think that one should also go through some tragedy in order to siphon some of whatever makes

the art resonate. The division between the consumer's cathartic release through relatability and

harmful envy of sadness is thin. The work, being a delicate transference of emotion through an

augural idiom, shouldn't be taken and appropriated into a flippant caricature of identification, or worse, be overshadowed by the life of the artist.


It's known that art is received more positively when one is told about the artist's

erraticism. The results cannot be quantified in the manner of "X amount of suffering equals Y

amount of admiration". If idiomatic sadness within art functioned as such, then entering the

Trauma Olympics would be a standard practice in the creative process. The issue arises in that

one may think they must enter into the Trauma Olympics to suffuse their work with what they've

read or heard about in their idols' lives. There's no need to seek out disparity while being in a

place of privilege to avoid it. Perhaps if you were doing a performance art piece à la Abramović.

But suffering, like death, taxes, and the urge to go to the restroom in a bookstore, is inevitable

anyway.


Le Grand Concert (1955), Nicolas de Staël

De Staël’s final painting, Le Grand Concert is a gigantic depiction of an orchestra's

unmanned instruments. After seeing a concert, he rushed home and spent the entirety of the

following day working on the piece. Two more days were spent painting. When it was complete,

he burned his sketches and leapt from the upper floor of his atelier at Antibes, the cumulative

act of a life punctured by depression and disappointments. A pseudo-psychologist would

fervently search for signs of depression in this final, unfinished piece. They'd be disappointed.

His son, Gustave de Staël, remarked on the sheer amount of life and the absence of sadness in

his works. However, that statement's accuracy remains unknown. A lifetime of tortured

experience can reside within a shade mixed and slathered. Only the artist can know the precise

amount of themselves poured out as a libation to creative demiurges.

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