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The life of 20th century artist Nicolas de Staël has been mythologized ever since he ended it by jumping from his studio age 41, at the height of his career, in 1955.
At times, experts say the myth has overshadowed more than 1,000 paintings he created in a span of just 15 years.
De Staël’s work has been a multi-year obsession of Patrick Quéré, an eccentric American, who claims that he holds a key to seeing the tragic artist’s output in a new light.
Quéré’s preoccupation began with a small painting he attributes to de Staël. Titled “La Clé” (“The Key”), and slightly smaller than an iPad, it was a gift from the artist to Quéré’s grandfather Jean. The two men were friends in postwar Paris, according to the Quéré family lore.
Quéré, who is independently wealthy and based in Hollywood, Fla., says he discovered —and cracked — a code hidden amidst the painting’s patchwork of geometric marks in various shades of blue.
Hiding in plain sight, he says, is the artist’s name, “Staël.” He also spotted similar patterns in other works, including “Composition” (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and 1952 painting, “Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs)” that fetched 20 million euros ($22.2 million) at Christie’s in 2019.
“He was encrypting his name in all these paintings,” Quéré, 43, said this week. “I discovered something millions of people never knew, and it was staring them in the face.”
Quéré claims that the artist’s encryption period lasted from 1948, when “The Key” was painted, to 1953 when de Staël gifted it to his grandpa Jean.
The validity of Quéré’s encryption theory — and the authenticity of his painting, which is unsigned — are the latest unknowns related to de Staël’s biography, whose dramatic twists and turns culminated in his suicide.
Born in 1914 into a prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia, de Staël was an orphaned exile by age seven. Raised by a couple living in Brussels, he studied painting at the L’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, then took off to travel in Southern Europe and Northern Africa. In the 1930s, he settled in France, then the epicenter of modern art. When the war started, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion but was quickly demobilized.
He spent the rest of the war making dark, brooding geometric paintings, using heavy impasto and the palette of grey, brown, and black. In his paintings he dropped the aristocratic “de,” signing simply “Staël,” according to experts.
Success came in the early 1950s when Abstract Expressionism was rising to become the dominant, most fashionable art form of the day.
“He felt he was carrying the future of painting in his hands,” said art historian Michael Peppiatt, an expert on de Staël, adding he brought the “warring factions” of abstraction and figuration together to “produce these extraordinary paintings. And that was a standout achievement in the history of the 20th century.”
Handsome, charismatic, and manic-depressive, de Staël became an overnight sensation in Paris and New York.
“In his heyday, he was the golden boy,” said David Nash, an art dealer, whose Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York staged de Stael exhibitions in 1997 and 2013.
“All the major American collections from the 1960s had a de Staël,” said Nash. “They’d have Giacometti, Dubuffet, Picasso and de Staël.”
Quéré said he didn’t know any of this when he found “The Key” in his grandfather Jean’s old apartment in Florida after his death. He grew up hearing the story about Jean’s “good friend Nicolas,” a starving artist, who came into the orbit of the Quéré family during the war.
Quéré’s great-grandparents Félix and Marie ran a brasserie that was popular with young artists because of its location near an art school, Quéré said. Long after the family moved to the United States in 1958, Jean would recall how Nicolas carried the little abstract painting (measuring 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches) in his pocket, according to Quéré.
“He was very close to my grandfather,” Quéré said. “He gave him the painting and gave him the instructions. My grandpa used to say: ‘When you look at the painting, you can see his name,’” Quéré said.
As a child, Quéré couldn’t see it. If anything, the work’s pattern reminded him of Tetris, the computer game he liked to play. But he was a kid and didn’t pay much attention— until decades later, when “The Key” ended up propped up against the wall on his desk during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking at it day after day, Quéré became determined to figure it out, which he set about doing using numerology, topography, cryptography, and math. “I had to piece everything together like a detective or an archeologist,” he said.
It was the latest of many careers he’s sampled, including working as a pharmacist, a pilot, a sailboat captain, and a bridge tender, Quéré says.
He is also an amateur portrait painter and once published a murder mystery novel, which had an unexpected real-life impact: A former classmate committed a murder in a way that looked like a scene from the book (Quéré says the book was pulled from the circulation; he was never accused of any wrongdoing.)
His de Staël quest, he said, “felt like it was my destiny.”
Analyzing the algorithms and superimposing them on the JPEGs of other paintings convinced Quéré that de Staël filled his paintings with various references to his name and its numeric equivalent: number five.
“It had some metaphysical meaning to him,” Quéré said. Like his last name, which has five letters, the artist used an elongated pentagon in his works and often depicted objects and shapes in groups of five.
Quéré says that “The Key” is made of approximately 240 blocks, with grid lines underneath to plot the squares.
The painting changed over the years. It was initially a seascape of Le Havre, painted around 1948 on a standard “marine 2”-canvas, measuring 24 centimeters by 14 centimeters. In 1949, the artist re-sized the painting to match the geographic coordinates of Antibes, the coastal town where he would die years later, according to Quéré.
He then painted an entirely different seascape on top of Le Havre, adding layers of impasto in sapphire blue, the color of the Mediterranean Sea. White blocks throughout the composition form its pattern, Quéré claims.
“By connecting the white blocks like a constellation of stars they form ‘Staël,’” he claims. In 1952, the artist stabbed the canvas with a knife, right into the pentagon area containing Ë, according to Quéré.
Quéré has had a tough time getting the art establishment behind his theory.
Peppiatt, the art historian, said he finds Quéré’s work “interesting, but I don’t think it gets us very far into de Staël’s fantastic paintings.”
Sandra Kisters, director of collections and research at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, said in an email she understands that it’s “tempting to see hidden messages in paintings by a mysterious and young deceased artist,” but noted the institution doesn’t officially support Quéré’s claims.
One big hurdle is that “The Key” isn’t listed among the 1,120 paintings in the artist’s catalogue raisonné; and hasn’t been vetted by Comité Nicolas de Staël, set up by his widow and children in 2005 to promote his legacy and authenticate his works.
Nash concurred: “There’s an incredibly accurate catalogue raisonné published by the family. Everything that’s not in it should be regarded with suspicion.”
Gustave de Staël, one of the artist’s sons, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment about Quéré’s research and “The Key.”
Quéré isn’t surprised by the radio silence.
“I had nothing but opposition during my quest,” he says, noting that he has contacted the committee, de Stael’s children, dealers and art historians.
He’d like one day to see an exhibition of all the encrypted paintings by de Staël with adjacent diagrams, showing how to decipher them. As for the painting that set him on his wild quest, Quéré says that it should not be locked away in a private collection.
“I’d like for a museum to acquire ‘The Key’ so that everyone can enjoy its beauty and enigma,” he says.
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