As he wrote in May 1952 of the effects of a gaze steeped in the Mediterranean, it was only to be expected that a retina scorched by what René Char called the “cassé-bleu” would end up seeing the sea red and the sand purple.

André Fermigier’s assessment of 1952 as “the year in which Nicolas de Staël crossed the Rubicon”1 was to be echoed by later critics, who identify it as a historic watershed in his work and declaration - albeit perhaps with less than total plausibility - of a sudden return to figurative art. Contemporary observers generally preferred to pinpoint departures in de Staël’s formal trajectory rather than continuity of aims and intent.

The moment in which de Staël’s reference to figure became more explicit can in any case be identified precisely as the evening of 26 March 1952, when the painter watched a football match at the Parc des Princes in Paris. The visual intuition generated by this event was then channelled with prompt immediacy into a long series of small paintings serving as preparatory sketches for the monumental canvas Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs), completed by April, in connection with which critics usually speak of more direct reference to natural elements, something previously limited in his work, and the birth of the personal synthesis of phenomenon and inner vision that was to inform de Staël’s poetic canon. In the historical context of the period, the rupture created by this return to figuration was all the more unexpected in view of the fact that the European artistic avantgarde was endeavouring at the time to drain the swamps of abstract painting.2 

The extraordinarily fruitful year of 1952,3 a prelude to the pictorial outpouring that was to mark the artist’s late period until his death in 1955, also saw the birth of the Cerruti seascape Marine. La Ciotat. Produced between May and June, when de Staël had left Paris for the Cote d’Azur with his family, the small canvas was painted from life on the beach between the seaside towns of Bormes, Le Lavandou and La Ciotat.
The foreground presents the figural outline of a ship laid out in broad, horizontal blocks in a composition whose effectiveness appears to rest almost exclusively on the heraldic and timber quality of colour: cyan, cobalt green, amethyst purple and vermilion. De Staël used a palette knife, his favourite tool from 1949 to 1954, to orchestrate the arrangement of taches in accordance with their layering and the vibration between adjacent areas with smooth or jagged outlines, a terrain already explored at great length by then. The extraordinary shifting of the palette into an electric tonal range can almost be seen as a late conquest for an artist who had already lingered so long in the light of the Mediterranean during his early years and reflects protracted exposure to sunlight, that was now also absorbed psychically, and resulted in retinal vision. As he wrote in May 1952 of the effects of a gaze steeped in the Mediterranean, it was only to be expected that a retina scorched by what René Char called the “cassé-bleu” would end up seeing the sea red and the sand purple.4
The painting was owned by the American collector and dealer Theodore Schempp, who met de Staël in the autumn of 1947, when they happened to be neighbours for a short period at Rue Gauguet 7 in Paris. 

Francesco Federico Cerruti bought it from the Galerie Daniel Malingue in Paris in 1997. As with many other works in his collection, this purchase provides further evidence of his awareness of Turin’s history as regards exhibitions. De Staël’s critical fortune in Italy owes in fact a great deal to his presentation in the city as from the early 1950s. Of the few major Italian shows, no fewer than five were held in Turin, including the 1955 and 1961 editions of Pittori d’oggi. Francia- Italia5 and the first solo show at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in 1960.6 This was followed in 1994 by the show at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca in Mamiano di Traversetolo, Parma.7 The untitled work of 1949 that entered the Cerruti Collection (cat. p. 856) a score of years after the seascape of 1952 was shown in an exhibition of work from Italian private collections at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 19618 and Marine. La Ciotat appeared in the 1959 Rome Quadriennale.9
Critics in Italy and the rest of the world came to focus after de Staël’s death by suicide on 16 March 1955 on the artist’s individual creative choice (mentioned at the beginning), viewing him in the history of 20th-century art as the painter who navigated a third path, avoiding the rigid dichotomy of abstract and figurative art, in favour of a lyrical imagery, a reflection of which in Italy can be found in the “ultimate naturalism” developed by Francesco Arcangeli as from 1954.  

[Laura Cantone]

1 “Année où Nicolas de Staël franchit le Rubicon. Et faisant fi du terrorisme abstrait qui régnait à l’époque dans le milieux d’avantgarde, attire à lui d’un geste souverain toute la diversité mouvante du réel.” A. Fermigier, “Un cosaque au cœur innombrable”, in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 1972, no. 403, p. 34, consulted in Martigny 1995b. 

2 Abstract art was called into question on the post-war Parisian art scene. On the one hand, it was championed by artists like Sonia Delaunay, Nelly van Doesburg and Jean Arp with the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1946, from which De Staël withdrew. On the other, as early as 1941, the group known as the Jeunes peintres de tradition française endeavoured also in political terms to strengthen their legacy with a return to a national art. De Staël took his distance from them too. 

3 The 1997 edition of the catalogue raisonné lists 1,100 dipinti for the period 1933-55, no fewer than 242 of which for the single year of 1952. 

4 “Et que voulez-vous si à force de flamber sa rétine sur le ‘cassé-bleu’, comme dit Char, on finit par voir la mer en rouge et le sable violet” (letter to Jacques Dubourg, Le Lavandou, June 1952, in De Staël 1997, p. 1001). 

5 Turin 1955b and Turin 1961d. 

6 Turin 1960b

7 Mamiano 1994. 

8 Turin 1961b.

9 Rome 1959-60.