Publisher's Synopsis
The first English catalogue raisonné on the influential creator of the abstract landscape
The first catalogue raisonné in English, this 800-page volume documents all 1,120 works by French painter Nicolas de Staël (1914-55) in full color. Expanded and updated from the French catalogue raisonné of 1997, it is augmented with classic texts on de Stael's work, exhibition histories, provenance for each work and essays by, among others, former chief curator of the Phillips Collection, Eliza Rathbone. Made (and exhibited) contemporaneously with American abstract expressionism, de Staël's works are characterized by thick impastoed bricks of color that oscillate between landscape and abstraction, compact composition and a singularly intense sense of light.
A major influence on American painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Etel Adnan, de Staël's earliest American champion and collector, Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, called de Staël "the most gifted, the most influential and the most painterly" of modern European painters.
