ABSTRACT
Nicolas de Stael's success was much resented. It was looked upon as a vestige of the glamour that had remained an untarnished possession of the School of Paris even after the center of aesthetic gravity had shifted to New York. French painting, in the terms de Stael still found viable, has never regained its former glory. The art coming out of Paris that commands our attention today derives from quite different assumptions. The abstract paintings he first produced in the 1940's—tenebrous structures of earth colors in which all the felicities of Parisian art were invested with the brooding emotions of the Occupation and the difficult period of the Liberation—reflected both the melancholy and the detachment, being at the same time a statement of the artist's dilemmas at that unpromising moment in history and of art's ability to confront them with dignity.
