Earlier that month, he had attended a concert in Paris featuring the music of Anton Webern. The sparse, crystalline notes had haunted him. "I want to paint like that," he whispered to the empty room. "Silence made visible."
He looked at his unfinished work, Le Concert . It was massive, a sea of red and blue, instruments waiting for a sound that wouldn't come. He realized then that he had reached the summit. There was nowhere left to go but into the blue. nicolas de staГ«l
The light in Antibes was too bright, a physical weight that pressed against Nicolas de Staël’s studio windows. It was March 1955, and the man who had spent his life running from the shadows of his Russian past—the son of a General in the Czar’s Guard, orphaned by the Revolution—found himself trapped by the very thing he chased: color. Earlier that month, he had attended a concert