Nicolas de Staël

Known for: thick impasto abstract and semi-figurative painting

Nicolas de Staël fled Russia as a child after the Revolution and spent his career in France developing a practice of thickly impastoed abstract painting that gradually introduced recognizable subjects — stadiums, musicians, the Sicilian landscape — into its surfaces. His late work, made in the final two years of his life in the Var and in Antibes, has a chromatic intensity and physical urgency that distinguishes it from anything he had made before. He died by suicide in Antibes in 1955 at 41.