Nicolas de Staël 'Paysage de Provence' 1953 Art Exhibition Poster

A single blue tree holds the right side of this 1953 landscape, standing against broad horizontal bands of chalk white, pale green and water blue. Nicolas de Staël laid the oil on with a spatula until the surface rose into ridges, so the picture reads as built matter as much as depicted country.

De Staël was born in Saint Petersburg in 1914 and took French citizenship in 1948. Paysage de Provence belongs to the summer that redirected his painting. In July 1953 he rented a magnanerie, an old silkworm farm, at Lagnes outside Avignon, and began working from the country in front of him, following the motif closely and tracking the light as it shifted through the day.

That close attention to an observed place unsettles the label usually attached to him. He had been celebrated in the early 1950s as one of the leading abstract painters in Paris, but he refused the division itself. A painting, he said, should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it represents space. This landscape sits on that hinge, its valley legible as land and sky while remaining flat slabs of pigment.

The method was physical. He worked with wide spatulas and sheets of metal rather than brushes, pressing colour into colour so the seams stay visible, and the results come closer to low relief than to conventional oil painting. The blue of the tree is the densest passage on the canvas, and it carries the composition against a field scraped almost to pallor.