Primarily, readers unacquainted with Stael's career will have missed a keen aesthetic pleasure. No amount of text or the finest illustrations can substitute for, or begin to suggest, the understated power of this artist's vision and the mastery of his materials, a command of paint and color that derive from proficiency in the service of tradition and a grasp of contemporary thought. At least as important as the pleasure in viewing his art as the aggregate of individually successful pictures, is the deficiency that Stael's work requites in the history of modern art, a gap as theoretically important as it is daring in execution.

In the sense that art of Nicolas de Stael responded to a perceived vacancy in art's dialectical progress, his work approaches the nature of scientific advance wherey questions can be proposed well ahead of their possible experimental solution. That is, his art could have been anticipated but no one had risked doing it, defying the urge for novelty and fashion.

De Stael's particular vocation could have been supposed from the evidence of earlier modernism, but no one had dared to live out his exacting response to destiny. The reason is simple: the taxing goals he had set for himself lay at the end of a treacherous and precarious journey. There was no guarantee that de Stael would succeed, as the history of modernism is strewn with failed ambitions; these usually are subtracted from the decorous and triumphalist narrative. There were aesthetic collapses and loses of nerve just as surely in the arts as in any other field, and often when dealing with the most highly refined sensibilities even the recovery from capitulation seems rewarding. So, when looking at the often politely gorgeous work of Kees van Dongen we can forget that he was once at the forefront of modernist advance. Likewise, reviewing the history of Cubism it seems impolite to notice that once, at the dawn of this century, Raoul Dufy stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Braque in exploring unknown territory and setting art's agenda. (What Dufy subsequently created is sufficiently rewarding that collectors seduced by his blithe subjects never question his apparent cheerfulness, while modernist critics never deign to consider the quotient of art that remains alive in his joyful work, paintings that seems too lighthearted to also be brainy.) In America--abundantly provincial until the post-war era--frequently insipid iterations of the School of Paris circulated by Stuart Davis and others have been confused with genuine advances of the School of Paris made by a resident American like Alexander Calder. Only by understanding how modernist failure can be overlooked does it make sense to stress that complete novelty has nothing to do with modernist authenticity. Then it is possible to re-examine territory left fallow by past masters.

At the heart of Nicolas de Stael's relative position in modern history is the myth of secular aesthetic theodicy. According to this fable time sorts out the truly good artists from the heap of the rightfully overlooked. The myth gains its durability, not from spectacular examples like Vincent Van Gogh, where the myth operated more-or-less effectively, but from the basic performance, over generations, by which taste winnows out the products of mere fashion. The spurious personalities--who happen to satisfy a particular critical or aesthetic circle--can be elevated for a time, but with the death of their literary coterie and investors the aura of influence fades and words like originality or genius become mannered then ludicrous. In the long run aesthetic theodicy operates in Stael's favor so that in a century some of today's current darlings will be flitting shades in art's underworld, footnotes, trivia. (Who today can name the sequence of prize winners in the mid-nineteenth century Paris Salons? In a century, today's Venice Biennale winners will also be mainly curiosities, holes into which the uniformed rich shoveled money.) An inversion will rectify the situation, and that transposition is already in progress; this catalogue raisonne helps to accelerate and catalyze the change.

Much of the mid-twentieth century can be understood in relation to de Stael's career and work. Presently de Stael's position is correlated to other, apparently fixed, stars of art history. Enormous, and rightly elevated reputations, like Jackson Pollock's, will be seen next to their actual accomplishments and then, picture for picture, de Stael's reputation will hold its own, notable for uncompromising hard vision. He maintained that rigor against the glamour of other more celerated names and trends, even though he was hardly unknown--which makes his stringency even more biting as he could not propel himself with the Bohemian bitterness of the loner or misfit.

The price Stael paid for his self-imposed severity was not the obscurity of an outcast like Van Gogh, the gleeful misrepresentation that the press unleashed on Jackson Pollock, or the self-inflicted personality distortions of Arshile Gorky. Even during Stael's lifetime he was a celerated artist, fashionable almost entirely for the wrong reasons; viewers were often attracted to suave color, magnificent paint handling, thoughtful if not quiescent subjects, and his preservation of European easel painting against the allure of the larger quasi-murals of the Abstract Expressionists. The antagonism of weighing de Stael against New York is false in the post-war era.

De Stael contributed a pictorial organization that extended the dual quality of the surface first essayed by, but hardly exhausted by, Cezanne. Surface could be organized as patterned design and also as a record of perceived depth and volume--with the material of paint operating in both realms simultaneously. How unfashionable this challenge seemed for a modernist artist: to go backward, to reclaim territory already covered but not fully exploited. For de Stael to recover this approach to painting risked appearing reactionary and suited for public lashing, i.e. critical censure in comparison with contemporary explorations. A similar burden was also shouldered by Giorgio Morandi in Italy, by Jochen Seidel in Germany. The early New York School itself recapitulated a painting technique that was the hallmark of European academics, while Impressionism (and then Cubism) treated representation in a very different manner. The vitality of tradition, and a colloquy with art's legacy in a really dialectical form was part of what de Stael made visible to his spectators.

In this he was the last, though not the last possible, scion of a long chain of artistic bequests. From Braque, Stael lovingly wrested the treatment of contrasting colored shapes upon surface, an inheritance that Braque had instantly commandeered when he encountered it in early Matisse. That relationship of animated shape to field Matisse had learned from his teacher, the wildly misunderstood Gustave Moreau (who, recognizing his anomalous situation, sequestered much of his art, withdrawing many pieces from view for a generation--which proved to be a successful gamble). Moreau, in turn, had inherited this notion from the apostate Chasseriau, who heretically leapt from the camp of Ingres to Delacroix. Ultimately, Ingres, whose figures seemed pasted into their backgrounds, gleaned this object-field relationship from his teacher, Jacques Louis David (who evolved from a young Rococo painter to the first important Neo-Classicist); David absorbed the lessons of his mentor Joseph Marie Vien, whose career was deflected by viewing reproductions of Pompeian wall frescos.

The ancestry of de Stael's neo-classical relationship of flat figures to ground will be readily apparent to even a novice who glimpses David's Count Potocki, 1781 (National Museum, Warsaw) and then considers a first-century Roman mural. Just so long-lived was this urge to systematically array a depiction of the world, to give regularity to sight. David's Count Potocki--upon his horse, saluting the viewer with a sheer stone wall rising at his back--situates a point halfway between ancient Rome and de Stael's still lives and nautical scenes, their subject's with sheer walls of color rising behind them.

Rather than unnatural rigidity this tradition--or craving, to order the world in a regular way--underlies grammar, theology and science. (Each share a sense that a few regulatory mechanisms^×a set of limiting rules--governs the world.) Sometimes the values of harmony and simplicity have come under attack in the last century because of their apparently anti-democratic implications; the wildly unpredictable masses are not tidy and democracy requires a deep trust in irregularity and unpredictability. Yet, not every implication espied must be enacted and aesthetic choices should not be suppressed any more than scientific experiments--all must be open to examination, nuclear fission or Surrealism, without necessarily wholesale implementation of the experimental results. Accordingly, Neo-Classicism prefers the regular to the erratic, the predictable to the random, sustainable lyricism to the momentary entertainment of fright, and so forth. The straining hyper-critical intelligence of an artist of the caliber of de Stael had to overpower the tension between Classical and the implications of the modern. That strain is visible in every one of his best canvases, which is to say, most of his later pictures: just so high was de Stael's batting average, so unceasing was de Stael's tribulation. The best tool for understanding the development and achievement of this artist, especially in comparison with the evolution of others is a complete inventory of his pictures.

There are many models for presenting the materials of a modern catalogue raisonne. The present volume lists his paintings and a similar book is underway for his drawings. Interestingly, catalogues raisonnE of modern artists present completely different problems from those of older artists. For one thing, the part of the listing that is raisonnE (French, past participle of "to reason") differs since--barring significant forgeries--the author scarcely has to demonstrate why works are included or excluded from the list. (Rembrandt's catalogue has, over more than a century, varied by a factor of more than 2, and the old joke says that Rubens painted one thousand works in his life of which five thousand are in America.) No theory of de Stael's work has to be developed and made raisonne. The wonderfully instructive illustration of frauds in the catalogue (Volume IV) of Jackson Pollock's works supply the reasoning behind the inclusion of other, authentic pieces, but Pollock's art, without apparent manual virtuosity or any attempt to achieve virsimiltude or a likeness of the visible world, beckoned to forgers. Sometimes, as in the case of the vivid catalogue of Morris Louis' works, the subtle and slightest distinctions between paintings must be made visible with highly refined photography, as that artist's development would be completely lost to harsh, coarse, or crude reproductions. In the present catalogue of de Stael, color is used well, but not universally throughout the book and the unknowledgeable reader may come away from the catalogue without a fully developed appreciation of what the artist so often achieved.

Occasionally biographical materials can help sustain the flow of an artist's work, and this book actually contains a separate volume of de Stael's letters bound in. That inclusiveness is gained by producing a cumbersome book. Such a trade-off has to be viewed against the alternatives. With many models to choose from, the de Stael catalogue continues a pattern set in its previous appearance, and so, the best comparison is with its own former incarnation to see what has been gained, or lost.

The first Nicolas de Stael catalogue of paintings (Paris: Le Edition du Temps) appeared in 1968 produced by AndrE Chastel. The catalogue raisonne of pictures was established by Jacques Dubourg and the artist's widow Francoise de Stael. The number of works listed in that volume was 1059 and, annotated by Germain Viatte, the artist's letters were interleaved with the development of the pictures, a pleasant arrangement, much reduced in effectiveness by the irregular placement of multiple reproductions on each plate. The quality of pictures was very high and the color reproductions first-rate and numerous. Most importantly, in relationship to the new version, the cut size of the single unboxed book was 1 1/4" thick, 8 î" wide, and 11" high. It proved an easy book to handle, inviting, comfortable to hold and read. Access to the information was seductively pleasant, which only amplified the pleasure of the artist's pictures.

Happily, part of the present book's swelling in it newest incarnation is not the result of more or even new information about each painting or the inclusion of numerous additional works, but the book's growth is accountable to a rationalization of the placement of images which in the earlier version ineffectually spangled the page in an `artful' but often onerously illegible format. In 1968 the images were interleaved with the letters and fitted, jigsaw-like, into a central space in the layout. Now each image (with dimensions, date, signature informatio n, site of its creation, materials, and a listing of provenance and bibliography) is instantly accessible and autonomously studied--a great advance on the earlier catalogue. Sometimes, the lack of graphically clear supports in a catalogue raisonne is conspicuous (as in the catalogue of Arshile Gorky's paintings), but this volume is a model of design clarity and concomitant accessibility.

The de Stael catalogue also includes a rich trove of pictures of the artist which, if seeming sycophantic now will only prove more useful in the future as the man, his personality, and the times through which he moved fade from memory and become just another age in the arcade of decades, centuries and eras. For its wealth of material on a crucially important artist, the Nicolas de Stael catalogue raisonne has instantly become essential to any serious art library, institutional or private.