Biography (10/10)
Florence 1945-1973. Painting

In this third and last stage of Staude's life - which comprises almost thirty years of incessant work - tradition and the contemporary spirit, vision and technique moulded themselves into his painting.
After the war his art kept evolving. "The new religion: that of the loneliness of man", of which Staude had written as a very young man, remained the key note of his work. His life became much quieter now and 'infinitly less social,' allowing his painting to come forcefully to the fore.
Outwardly, Staude was a family man (his son Jakob was born in Germany in 1944, in 1947 Renate and the children had returned to Florence), who made his living by teaching painting and history of art at the American colleges on the hills of Bellosguardo or in his own studio in the Via de' Serragli 148. He was a born teacher and loved to teach. To teach means to communicate, to teach means to pass on: to him, two of art's main functions. 'Being constantly surrounded by people who wish to learn relieves one of that feeling of loneliness that often befalls an artist,' he said in his last year to the journalist Neera Fallaci. Through his courses in history of art he was able to keep up an almost daily conversation with the masters of the past. He called them 'my ancestors' and drew from them much encouragement and inspiration.
One of the most brilliant young people among those attending classes at his studio was Lorenzo Milani (1941), the famous future rebel priest. When, in the matter of a year, the young man decided to take the vows of priesthood, he thus explained this decision to his former art teacher: 'It's all because of you. It was you who spoke to me of the necessity to search for the essential, to eliminate all details and to simplify; to see every subject as an entity in which each part is connected to the other. I was not satisfied by looking for these relationships among colours alone. So I chose another path.'
Staude felt surer and surer of the "path" he himself had chosen, in spite of the fact that the art that was fashionable in his day did not seem to prove him right. "The solitude in which I place myself by breaking with all those who are in fashion, freightens me less and less", he wrote to his mother. None of his almost annual personal shows were particularly successful and he remained fairly isolated among the crowd of painters. For one who kept dreaming of the role that the artist had played in the society of the Renaissance it was a painful situation. But he consoled himself by thinking of Cézanne, who had so much hoped that at least one of his paintings would be exhibited at the Paris Salon and who had been equally disappointed.
Still, there were many who appreciated Staude's art. The modern art gallery of the Pitti Palace in Florence purchased five of his paintings; the Uffizi bought one drawing and a self-portrait for its prestigious "Galleria degli autoritratti"; European and American collectors came to his studio and hundreds of paintings were thus sold.
His life, though never easy, remained rich and varied. Music played in the large drawing room at the Via delle Campora (when emigrating to the US, Maya Winteler had left him the grand piano that her brother Albert Einstein had given her and which she had played together with Staude),journeys, encounters and conversations with both the most humble and the most cultivated people of his time contributed to weave that 'lovely spider web' as which he described his life as it was drawing to a close.
His yearly summer holidays in Rome or Venice - two essential stepping stones in his art - caused him gradually to abandon the 'noble grey green of Florence' by introducing him to more voluptuous shapes and colours.
In order to be able to paint them in all its transparent luminosity, in 1955, during a long Roman working holiday, Staude took up pastel. With this medium, which in the course of the years he would develop to unusual perfection, he produced some of his best work. But when he tried to translate the lesson learnt from pastel into oil, he came up against huge technical difficulties. His serious nervous breakdown in 1957 was caused by this exhausting struggle for a more refined technique, by the persistent lack of public recognition, and by yet another disappointment in an artist friend - this time a young German sculptor - who had failed him in his hope that together they might form an artistic community. Yet, Staude persisted in his ceaseless endeavour to translate onto canvas 'what has been on my mind for such a long time,' as he wrote to Françoise d'Origny Simon, a pupil and friend from Paris.
In 1956, an exhibition of his own paintings lead him back to Hamburg. As the old world unfolded before his eyes, he found it to be unexpectedly familiar: 'I shall try now to stand with two legs on this beautiful world: Florence and Hamburg,' he wrote to Christopher Norris.
In 1962 his mother died and the last beloved link with the happy and colourful world of his Haitian youth disappeared with her.
One year later Staude began to transform the plot of wasteland that surrounded his studio in the Via de' Serragli into a garden. This garden, with its bushes and flowers, was to become the subject of his last paintings. Here his last and dearest pupils gathered: four or five young Florentine men with no formal education whose devotion accompanied him till the very end. He briefly even dreamt that "The Garden" might become the name of a new artistic movement. In 1966 he presented his work collectively with that of his pupils and the scultpor Hans Kaunat at Florence's Galleria III, but when the exhibition failed to be successful, that dream also faded away.
In 1963 the Accademia delle Belle Arti of Florence organized an important retrospective of Staude's work. It was presented in the catalogue by Ulrich Middeldorf, the Director of the German Institute of History of Art in Florence, a renowned scholar and one of Staude's most consistent admirers, and attracted, if not the attention of the official art critics, at least that of new fans and collectors.
Ever since the beginning of his Florentine life, Staude had chosen his models from among the simple people. Peasant women, car park attendants, roadsweepers, shoemakers, innkeepers and artisans had interested him for the anonymous monumentality of their Mediterranean heads. 'I keep trying to attract these figures to my studio, as it is because of them, really, that I have remained here,' he wrote in 1957 to a German painter friend.
In the Sixties those very same 'figures' began to interest him - or 'to concern' him, as he said, - not so much for their heads, but for 'their daily attitudes.' He thus painted The Man in the Tram, The Cyclist, The Girl with an Umbrella, The Man with the Newspaper, The Gardener, The Roadsweeper, and many others. Also the series called "Le Cascine" (1962-1966) after the park in Florence where they were painted - bodies of men and women lying peacefully in the grass, playing or reclining beneath trees - was the result of this diminishing interest in the individual, this ever-growing passion for colours and shapes.
In 1965, when the acrylic paints appeared on the market, Staude's technical problems were solved. 'Finally I have found in the acrylic tempera a material that suits me […]. The painting acquires a luminosity and a transparency as I was never able to achieve it with oils,' he wrote to Olaf Oloffson.
In the summer of 1966 Staude went to Castagno d'Andrea, a small mountain resort in the Tuscan Apennines. His intention was to take a rest. 'Mountain landscapes - who has been able to paint them well? I only know of the East Asians,' he had written to his mother in 1957. Now it was precisely the challenge of 'all those greens', combined with the complete absence of man, that fascinated him. Thus, he immersed himself in the very subject that he had always considered unpaintable. 'How many times do I still have to fall in love with a place? […] I feel bewitched!' he wrote to Christopher Norris. He returned to Castagno for four summers in a row, saying that the landscape reminded him of the mountains of Haiti.
While in both Venice and Rome Staude krept returning to a group of friends and artists who unfailingly welcomed him with affection, at Castagno he became a solitary figure. In the morning he would leave his rented room and walk with his easel towards his motifs - hills, trees or a rooftop against the distant mountains; in the evening he would exchange a few words with a holiday-maker at the village's only bar. 'My days consist of (five or six) hours of work and hours of tiredness,' he wrote to his daughter. 'I sweep my room, do my laundry and talk to the bus driver who arrives at one and eats with me.'
In 1968, he left for a long, wonderful trip through Europe to paint a series of portraits. It brought him back to Paris and Hamburg: 'A very precious recollection.' From 1970 onwards, he spent even the summer months in Florence, painting. He painted hippies, the new long-haired young people in their disorderly poses, as well as his beloved garden whose plants grew so exuberantly that people would say they looked tropical, 'Haitian.'
The man with whom Staude talked about all this, art and life, was Giorgio Colli, the Italian philosopher known for the definitive critical edition of Nietzsche's work - his last friend.
Painting no longer worried him with its problems. He felt he had solved them: 'I think I know now how to do it.' The paintings of the last ten years, with their 'angry look,' as he once called it, proved it. He had given them a dash of sensuality - the very same sensuality that had been inhibited at his first encounter with the stern Florentine landscape.
A good deal of work had been done and his sensitive mind could calm down. It was like a slow settling of accounts, like getting ready for life's conclusion. He said of himself (just as Cézanne and van Gogh and Marées and so many others before him) that he hadn't done much more for painting than continuing its tradition and opening up a new path for it. 'Perhaps there will be some people (also among the young) […], who will accept my suggestion that the best part of painting is looking. And that looking will take us much deeper than rationalizing; that inventing is the same as looking, observing creatively; that the appearance and its meaning are one and the same,' he wrote in 1972 to Herbert Schmidt-Colinet. And to Christopher Norris: 'Perhaps my paintings can indicate the direction in which it may be worthwhile to persevere.' This was what at the age of thirteen he had promised he would try to do. "And in the end, life is the finest poetry".
In 1972 it seemed that his efforts were to come together also before the public eye: a large exhibition in Hamburg was organized with the help of his banker friend, Eric Warburg. Staude - now sixty-seven - prepared for it with the same excitement that, at nineteen, he had felt before his departure for Munich. The idea was to return to the city he had left fifty years earlier and show it that he had fulfilled his artistic promise.
That exhibition opened to a grotesque, almost tragic spectacle. The paintings were held up at the Italian border and the opening took place in front of bare walls. Staude felt he had been pierced "by the poisoned arrows of voodoo".
A year later he died in Florence.
'One should become invisible behind one's paintings. The work should be in the foreground; not oneself,' he had written in one of his last letters to his daughter.