Born in Saarbrücken to a Neapolitan glassmaker father, Nestlé went to Paris alone at 16, found work as a clerk in a lithography shop, and there met Henri Matisse — who looked at his drawings and gave him the advice: "Listen to everything that is said, look at everything that is done, and do what you want." He moved to Berlin at 18, exhibited at the Berlin Secession, and immersed himself in Bauhaus and Kandinsky's circle. When fascism rose, he initially resisted the Nazis, then fled to Paris in 1933. There, the legendary dealer Kahnweiler — who had launched Picasso, Braque, and Derain — wanted to represent him. Nestlé turned him down, insisting he was "neither a painter nor an artist, simply a man who paints." He lived modestly on the proceeds of his work for the rest of his life, evolving toward a spontaneous abstract expressionism influenced partly by Motherwell.