Nicolas de Stael Exhibition

12 March 2003 - 30 June 2003

Gallery 1 / 11:00AM - 9:00PM
Adults: EUR 8,5
Children under 12: EUR 6,5

Open until 11:00PM on Thursdays

Centre Georges Pompidou
Metro stations: Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville, Châtelet
Bus lines # 29, 38, 47, 96
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/

          The Nicolas de Stael exhibition features almost 220 major works, including 135 paintings, 80 drawings, and illustrated books, prints and unpublished documents from public and private collections as well as the Pompidou Center.

           Among them are Composition (1949) -- which made the National Modern Art Museum one of the first museums to acquire a work by Nicolas de Stael -- and Les Toits ("Rooftops", 1952), which the artist donated the year he painted it.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1954 Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris © Adagp, Paris 2003	Les footballeurs, 1952 Pompidou Center Collection National Modern Art Museum © Adagp, Paris 2003

           Laid out in chronological sequence, the exhibition presents works the artist painted between 1939 and 1955 at his studios in Paris, in Provence and on the French Riviera.

           Exhibiting Nicolas de Stael today reveals how contemporary his work is. De Stael was always in a state of continuous rebirth. Through paintings, drawings and prints, he demonstrated art's power to grasp the tangible world and depict its light, space and colors.

           De Stael went beyond the opposition between "abstraction - figuration" that characterized art at the time, focusing the attention of critics on him and stirring up stormy debates about his work.

	The exhibition features works which Nicolas de Stael painted at the same time as such masterpieces as La vie dure (1946), Le Parc des Princes (1952), the Agrigente series (1953) and L'Orchestre (1953), and that he kept in his workshop, unsigned.
Le Concert, 1955 Picasso Museum in Antibes © Photographed by Claude Germain

Nu, 1953 Pompidou Center Collection National Modern Art Museum © Adagp, Paris 2003	Parc des Princes, 1952 Private collection © Adagp, Paris 2003

          They are oil studies painted from life, India ink and charcoal drawings, sketches made with pencil and felt-tipped pen -- a tool with which he was one of the first to experiment.

          This show belongs to a series of Nicolas de Stael exhibitions in France that started at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1981, and continued at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1991, then at the Paris City Hall in 1994. This one is bigger however than any previous exhibitions.

Les Toits de Paris, 1952 Pompidou Center Collection National Modern Art Museum © Adagp, Paris 2003	Composition rouge, 1947 Pompidou Center Collection National Modern Art Museum © Adagp, Paris 2003