by Nicolas de Staël

Translated from the French by Helen Stevenson and Nico Mann

Preface by Jean Frémon

Publication date: 1 October 2026

‘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.’ – from Jean Frémon’s preface to the Selected Letters

This selection of letters by renowned French painter Nicolas de Staël begins in 1926 when he was 12 years old and ends the day before his death. 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 De Staël’s 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 if it is to be successful, or even honest. And always he is aware of the complementary roles of language and painting. 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.  

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