<Le Lavandou>

In May 1952, Nicolas de Staël moved to the south of France, where he made studies on the beach at Le Lavandou, facing the sun at its zenith. Back in his Paris studio, he translated these impressions into works of vibrant, saturated colour. In this painting, with its unusual vertical format for a landscape, the motif of the bathers – positioned like an abstract sign – is firmly anchored in the brown sand. Reduced to raw forms, their silhouettes resist the dissolution of contours and the flattening of volumes, threatened by the voraciousness of the light.