Portrait photographique original de Nicolas de Staël assis devant une de ses toiles

Original photographic portrait of Nicolas de Staël sitting in front of one of his paintings
Paris s.d. (circa 1954), photograph: 17.4 x 20.4cm; leaf: 18.2 x 24cm

Original silver print portrait of Nicolas de Staël by Denise Colomb.
Beautiful candid shot of the painter, preparing to speak, in his atelier in rue Gauget in Paris, one year before his death. Seated in front of one of his works, we see the piling up of the painter's canvases in the room behind him.
The photograph was taken by Denise Colomb, great portraitist of the 20th century, known for her portraits of Antonin Artaud, Giacometti, Picasso, Soulages and Miro in their studio.

“It is said that his workshop was the cave of a palaeontological potter. With sediment, layers of paleo... A crucible, a large material well, riddled with pigments, paintbrushes, pots of plastered trowels, buckets, rags. In a strong smell of turpentine. A workshop covered, soiled, stained with dirt, with masonry clay. Its wingspan, its strength, its topsail height springs into this crater of Vesuvius. Slightly disoriented, he leans, he pours. To paint, for him, is to be prey to vertigo, to unpredictable, accidental, chance junctions. (Patrick Grainville, Les Yeux de Milos).