Nicolas De Stael: Paintings 1950-1955

New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1997. First Edition. Paperback. Very Good+/None. Handsome blue softcover; spine is uncreased, and edges are softened. (No DJ). Former owner's blindstamp to title page. Interior is otherwise clean and unmarked. Oblong quarto, 11 x 9.5 ins. Our photos depict actual book offered for sale. Books are carefully packaged by hand and ship from our family-owned bookshop in the US. BOOK INFO: Catalogue of the exhibition at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, New York, November 4 to December 13, 1997. With a frontis of the artist before one of his works. Illustrated in 40 glossy, full-color reproductions. With three essays: From Ravenna to the Twentieth Century by Dominique Astrid Levy and Simon Studer; Les Pays se dressent en ateliers... by Anne de Stael; Sur un rouge de Nicolas de Stael qui peut egalement etre dit blanc by Andre du Bouchet. 'For de Stael, life was a compelling and intense experience which he struggled to convey in paint. His letters are passionate with his response to visual experience, especially qualities of light, and his paintings attest to the senations of his experience before nature that he recorded with a rare sensitivity to color and his medium. Even in the 1940s when his work appeared abstract, de Stael denied that it could be so. He believed that abstraction must have a subject. Indeed his heavily impastoed paintings of the forties characterized by movement and an intensity of mood, inevitable evoke in the viewer an emotional response. This abstract impulse continued to underlie and give compositional strength to de Stael's work of the fifties.' -from the Introduction by Eliza Rathbone. Includes chronology.