Contemporary Arts
Limited Gift
THE incomplete career of Nicholas de Stael, who died last year at the age of forty-one and who is the subject of a memorial exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, would make a useful guide to the characteristics of post-war painting. Like the plot of some un- finished novel, his work not only invites speculation as to how the story might have developed, but leaves the very identity of the completed parts ambiguous and tantalising. This show demonstrates admirably, with the aid of a most informative catalogue, the three main phases of his production. It shows how de Stabl's early abstracts, which in one way or another depended upon a linear pattern or at least a free calligraphic handling of paint, gave way about 1951 to those mosaic-like pictures built from roughly shaped rectangles of pigment applied with an extraordinarily rich and varied impasto, pictures of the kind which dominated his exhibition at ' the Matthiesen Gallery in 1952 and which repre- sent his most personal contribution to modern painting. It illustrates finally his return to a degree of figuration that we discover, for example, in a painter like Morandi. Already this return has encouraged some critics to view his life as part of the world victory of Realism, but this, it seems to me, is to take a most superficial view. There is a stage at which arithmetic is made easier for us by reckoning with beans instead of numbers or by thinking of men filling tanks, but what we study is still mathematics and not horticulture or sociology. The admission into a picture of candles or fruit or birds is not in itself sufficient to transform a painter's gifts, his vision or his achievement, however serious may be his intentions; and I do not find that de Statl's latest pictures have any different or enhanced significance by comparison with his immediately previous painting. His gift was very limited, though within its limitations powerful and persuasive, tasteful and intelli- gent. Through an exquisite sensibility to tone and a less obvious but nevertheless consider- able sensitivity to colour, he could make a surface vibrate with life and evoke a simple spatial pattern. He achieved this most suc- cessfully with his rectangles of luscious paint (add this quality of handling to his taste and seriousness and intelligence and his wide popu- larity in the Fifties is largely explained), but the essential monotony of such a limited
vocabulary of forms reflects a deeper and more destructive weakness—an inability to invent form, which in the case of figurative painting means a failure to make a powerful re-creation of existing forms. De Stael's return to figura- tion automatically enlarged his vocabulary, but in no case, whether the subject be peaches or boats or the forms and features of land- scapes, was he able, I believe, to re-present objects so that they matter, so that one's experir ence of these things is renewed and revitalised. In this respect as well as others the most obviously unsatisfactory picture here is that of a flock of birds—gulls, the catalogue tells us— winging over the sea, a theme which cannot fail to arouse in the imagination a complex image of movement, of linear rhythms as well as the peculiar anatomy and motion of the creatures themselves. Whereas a drawing by Picasso or Matisse would at least satisfy and probably extend these imaginings', de Steel makes the occurrence seem banal, an affair of paint. I wonder whether his return to the objective world was not cqnsciously or uncon- sciously a confession of his deficiency in this essential part of a painter's formative gift. Unfortunately the study of nature cannot of itself supply such a capacity, though his early death must close all speculation and criticism with a question-mark.
' BASIL TAYLOR
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