Nicolas de Staël

The prices for Nicolas de Stael’s works are now back to their 1997 level. Nevertheless potential increase for the artworks of this major French modern artist remains fairly interesting.

The Russian-born painter of the post-war Paris school Nicolas DE STAËL struggled to get his style accepted early in his career. For Staël the 1940s were a bleak period of doubt and poverty. His 1945 exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher passed largely unremarked, as had all his previous shows. Then, championed by Theodore Schempp in the US and Jacques Dubourg in France he finally met with success in 1950. At the time he was exploring the frontiers of abstraction, applying slabs of paint with a palette knife to create coloured forms that were bold in structure and shimmering with light. In 1951-52 he underwent a transition and began producing landscapes and still lifes with a determinedly fresh vision of reality. Later works from 1954-55 seem to be moving towards a more fluid and transparent style. In 1955, unable to cope with his sudden success after years of struggle, he killed himself.

Artworks at auctions

His working life only lasted some 15 years. In this time he painted more than 1,000 canvases that shift between figurative and abstract work. Alongside Riopelle and Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël is one of the best-selling painters of the Paris school. But today, as during his life, it is his later works after 1953-54 which are the most successful. Paintings from this brief late period do better at auction than those from the preceding 12 years. None of his abstract works from the 1940s has ever sold for more than a million dollars. His current record is for Syracuse, painted in 1954, a light-filled composition of slabs of colour hovering between the figurative and the abstract, that sold for USD1.9 million at Ader-Picard-Tajan in 1990. Paintings make up nearly 45% of de Staël lots sold at auction. Of these 70% have sold for over USD100,000. His drawings generally go for around USD10,000 but some of his late collages command prices of USD30,000 and up. Around a third of the pieces found at auction are prints and nearly all sell for more than USD1,000.

The market places

Since the late 1980s the main markets for de Staël’s work have been the UK and US, which between them take nearly 90% of his turnover. But Paris is the top venue by number of works, auctioning 35% of total lots sold. Half his drawings are sold in France while prints are the speciality of Germany.

Buy or sell

The price for a de Staël has remained fairly stable over the last few years. True, in 2000, his price level edged up after a number of big successes at auction, including Atelier vert, coin d’atelier (1954), which sold for USD1.35 million on 11 November 2002 at Christie’s New York. But it then slipped back to 1997 levels. The blip in 2000 owed much to the scarcity of supply, only six of his works came to auction that year and the three that were sold went in a blizzard of eager bidding. Le Havre, vue de la Côte d’Honfleur, estimated at FRF300,000-400,000 found a buyer at FRF1.1 million on 21 June 2000 at Piasa. Now buyers tend to find many more of his works at auction, drawn from a wider range of styles than three years ago.
But prices in recent years have been well below those seen in 1990. On 17 April 2002, a small Nicolas de Staël oil on canvas, Marine (1954) which measured 14 x 33 cm was sold for EUR170,000 at Nicolay. The same work went for EUR274,408 in June 1990. The relative shortage of his works that have come to the market, taken with the high hammer prices seen 13 years ago, suggests that anyone buying a de Staël today can expect to make healthy gains on their investment in the future. The market is likely to be stimulated by a major show at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris) running from 8 March to 30 June 2003.
But be warned: the value of de Staël’s lithographs has already risen considerably over the last few years. Méditerranée, a 1952 lithograph from an edition of 200, sold for EUR4,300 at Dörling, Hamburg, on 23 March 2002. The same work had fetched EUR1,432 in 2001 at Hauswedell & Nolte, EUR2,422 in 2000 at Auktionsverket and a great deal less at sales a few years before. In 1998 for instance you could have picked it up at Bonham’s for EUR543. These recent gains make it unlikely that de Staël prints will offer the same returns as his unique works in the next few years.

    Nicolas de StaëlArtprice Indexall media categories, base January 1997 = 100, currency: EUR   Nicolas de Staël Number of lots sold   Nicolas de Staël Auction sales turnover 1992-2002 / weight by country © Artprice