JACQUES NESTLE (Sarrebruck 1907- Paris 1991)

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"I am neither a painter nor an artist, I am simply a man who paints"

Jacques Nestlé was born in 1907 in Saarbrück, Saarland, border region of France. His father, a craftsman glassmaker, is of Neapolitan origin, and his mother Sarroise. They speak both german and french at home.

 

In 1923-1925 : At the age of  16, Nestlé decides to go to  France and discovers the Paris of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and its galleries. He struggles living on small jobs. After a brief return to his native Saarland, Nestlé finds a job as a clerk in a lithographic printing shop. There he meets Matisse to whom he shows his drawings, and who encourages and advises him:

 "Listen to everything that is said, look at everything that is done, and do what you want."

Jacques Nestlé will later comment on these words of the Master that he will never forget: "Honestly it was already what I did. In any case, it's since, what I've always done. "

 

1925-1933: At the age of 18, he leaves for Berlin: "It was culturally and artistically a city in turmoil". The sculptor Kolbe encourages him again.

Jacques Nestlé is the chef-decorator in the two department stores of the city. And he paints. The following year, he exhibited for the first time four of his works at the renowned Berliner Secession. "It did not really look like anything or anyone." These pieces are noticed and one of them gets the honours of one of the greatest art magazines of the time.

These years of training and work in the hustle and bustle of Berlin's Bauhaus and avant-garde will mark his work, particularly Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

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Then his life changes course. "We saw Nazis everywhere. They did the Law and the Terror where they wanted. They were "the Order". I opposed it and fought them "

The young Nestlé knows what is at stake. "Understand: when you believe in something or when you do not share an opinion, even if it does not concern you, you must know how to take responsibility, engage, fight. At that moment, if you are sincere, the risk is secondary.

I received death threats, I was Sarrois. When Hitler, whom I had seen, was appointed Chancellor, I fled with my companion. "

Nestlé flees Berlin to Paris in 1933, carrying only a few paintings, monotypes and woodcuts, the only evidence of this time. He is a decorator, especially for the Universal Exhibition. But his only reason for being remains painting.

In post-war Paris, Jacques Nestlé observes the city that is being built and expanding, in perpetual change. On construction sites, he captures the essence of gestures, the relationship of men to work. Cranes and machines intertwine in a game of lines and tensions where the man at work is the vibrating heart. He also tirelessly draws nudes, seeking, like Matisse, the essential curve.

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The dealer and art collector, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, wants to promote him as he did with Picasso, Braque, Derain or Gray. But Jacques Nestlé does not respond to his invitation.

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In the early 1950s, Nestlé explores for a while the field of geometric abstraction on stage at the salon des Réalités Nouvelles. This rather short period is nevertheless decisive in its course: its dynamic vision of space is enriched by intense blacks.

Nestlé then directs his research towards a form of pictorial expression that cultivates the ambiguity between figuration and pure abstraction. His nudes, which are reminiscent of Matisse's curves or the anatomical composition of Picasso's cubist nudes, then tend towards an abstraction with very personal writing where the use of forms and collages builds a dynamic and colorful abstract space. In his Odalisques, Totem-Figures, ink-motifs, abstract forests, cosmic spaces, landscapes, he develops a vocabulary of forms whose values will become constitutive of his work. His luminous blacks echo the primary colors.

In parallel, Abstract expressionism of the School of New York, especially Motherwell who took part of the Realités Nouvelles, brings Nestlé to a more spontaneous creation, in the image of the imperious desire that seizes the painter at the moment of inspiration. Nestlé develops a personal form of Abstraction where the artist gives free rein to a direct expression, a reflection of his inner emotion. In the apparent pure pleasure of painting that the artist claims, nothing is left to chance in the composition. Structured spaces responding to sensual curves, abstractions of forms, light of white backgrounds, collage: it is in full mastery of his art, that he uses the fluidity of the gouache and the ink in his mixed techniques on paper.

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