View of Agrigente, 1954
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Frame (wood with gold gilding): 41 1/2 x 57 1/2 x 3 in. (105.41 x 146.05 x 7.62 cm) Image: 34 1/2 x 50 3/4 in. (87.63 x 128.91 cm)
- Accession Number
- 89.13
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Rita and Taft Schreiber Collection
Given in loving memory of her husband, Taft Schreiber, by Rita Schreiber
In his landscapes, nudes, and action scenes of the 1950s, de Staël eroded the distinction between abstraction and figuration. He claimed that a painting should be “abstract as a wall, figurative as a representation of a space,” meaning that it is simultaneously a flat, two-dimensional surface and a window
opening onto a world of depth, atmosphere, and spatial relationships. All three canvases on view here exemplify de Staël’s signature use of thick blocks of paint in saturated colors, often overlapping and applied with a palette knife.
In View of Agrigente, de Staël builds his composition with heavily impastoed, encrusted geometric shapes while also conveying the intense Mediterranean light and dramatic landscape of Agrigento, Sicily.
