De Staël, Nicolas (1914-1955), French painter, whose work explores the relationship between artistic tradition and innovation. De Staël, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into an old aristocratic family, emigrated with his parents to Poland after the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, his father and mother soon died and De Staël was brought up in Belgium, where until 1934 he studied at the Académie Saint Gilles and the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

De Staël joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 but was demobilized in 1940. He then settled in Nice, France, where he met French artists Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, and Swiss architect Le Corbusier. French painter Georges Braque introduced De Staël to J. Dubourg, a leading Paris art dealer; Dubourg and fellow gallery owner Jeanne Bucher supported De Staël through a period of extreme poverty. He became a French national in 1948.

During the last 13 years of his life De Staël devoted himself to painting and drawing, producing some 1000 canvases, chiefly in oils. His paintings after 1949 were greatly influenced by the work of French artist Henri Matisse. De Staël regarded his art as a dialogue with painters who had preceded him: works by artists of the past were a continual source of inspiration as he sought to reconcile creativity with tradition.

After 1952, disenchanted with the ongoing artistic debate over the respective merits of abstract and representational styles, De Staël began painting vigorous landscapes and still lifes in a free and unrestrained manner, using pure, bright colors. In 1953 he settled in the Vaucluse region of southern France, not far from French poet René Char, an old friend with whom he had collaborated on a book of poems in 1952. De Staël spent his last days in Antibes, France, where he committed suicide.