by Nicolas de Staël

Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson and Nico Mann
With a preface by Jean Frémon

Publication date: 1 October 2026

Available in English for the first time, these letters are taken from the several hundred letters anthologised by French art historian Germain Viatte, published in 2014 by Le bruit du temps. As well as an intriguing investigation of one of the great 20th-century painters, these are also the letters of a writer. From his adolescence onwards, Nicolas de Staël developed an incisive style of his own, capturing – as in his paintings – the reality of what he saw with the intensity of pure simplicity.

‘Nicolas de Staël’s letters are imbued with that mixture of absolute certitude and profound doubt which is the mark of a great artist. His belief in his destiny – which arises from faith – places the bar so high that it will always be impossible to clear. … He had the premonition that the path would be long and winding before it ever broke onto a clearing. Staël is not, like Raphaël, Géricault or Seurat, a precocious genius. If he must be compared to one of his predecessors, it is impossible not to think of Van Gogh.’ – Jean Frémon

‘This selection of letters begins in 1926 when de Staël was 12 years old and ends with the last letter he wrote on the day he died. De Staël wrote thousands of letters – to his adoptive parents, his wives and lovers, his children, gallery owners and dealers, poets, fellow painters and those who bought his work. They describe the course of his life from young man eagerly awaiting a cheque from a family member at a post office in Cadiz so he can buy his daily kilo of tomatoes, his wine, his newspaper, paints, canvases and sketchbooks, to the final months, when black gulls began to gather on his canvasses, bringing a darker, inky sense of foreboding to work that until then had been characterised by a boundless sense of colour and light. The letters also show the evolution of his understanding of painting, of what painting actually is, of the human cost – what part of the self must be sacrificed to it. And always he is aware of the complementary roles of language and painting. De Staël’s work, though it bears traces of figuration, is never illustrative; the writing is his illustrative tool, and his own words provide a dazzling commentary on the paintings.’ 
– Helen Stevenson

From French reviews of the complete letters:

‘As absorbing and fascinating as the letters of Van Gogh.’ – Richard Blin, Le Matricule des anges

‘He puts his entire being into every sentence he writes, as though each one were an irrevocable act. He will do this until the very end.’ – Philippe Lançon, Libération

‘A rapid, ecstatic, at times violent but resolutely poetic rhythm. The writing of Nicolas de Staël is that of urgency, of creation, emotion, and doubt.’ – Daphné Bétard, Beaux-Arts Magazine

‘After having read these letters, so full are they with belief and life and tragedy, we see the colours, the skies, the rooftops painted by this hand which almost seems to move and tremble before us. A life in words and in painting.’ – Lisbeth Koutchoumoff, Le Temps

‘In reading these letters, one has the feeling of being as close as possible to the creative act, through its day to day struggles, the fondness and generosity felt for loved ones, through its vertigo, nobility and its disdain for everything commercial, through its incessant desire for renewal and its “inevitable need to break everything when the machine runs too smoothly”.’ – Édith de La Héronnière, Revue des deux mondes

‘To immerse yourself in [de Staël's] letters is to follow the thread of his biography: his formative years, his travels to Spain and Morocco, the visits he made to museums and to the masters (Vélasquez, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Courbet) and gradually learning from them the rules of drawing, composition, colour; but also his intensely passionate relationships, his family life, his friendship with Braque and René Char, his chronic financial difficulties and later, right at the end of the 1940s, the recognition, the first exhibitions and the beginning of a more comfortable material existence – this just a few years before his death aged 41. For Nicolas de Staël more than anyone else, the biography is inseparable from the work. It is as though it were in constant evolution, in search of itself.’ – Nathalie Crom, Télérama

Paperback original, with French reverse flaps
250 pages, 180 × 135 mm
RRP £14.99
ISBN 978-1-0684338-9-4