Description
Composition oil on canvas 471/2 x 471/2 in. (120.6 x 120.6 cm.) Painted circa 1935 PROVENANCE Denis Mitchell, Cornwall, until 1990. Grob Gallery, London, 1992, where purchased by the present owner. LITERATURE S. Bowness, Ben Nicholson, Helly Nahmad exhibition catalogue, London, 2001, p. 7, no. 5, illustrated. EXHIBITION London, Annely Juda, The Thirties, July-September 1998, ex-catalogue. London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Ben Nicholson, September 2001, no. 5, illustrated. NOTES During the 1930s Ben Nicholson explored the concept of abstraction in two major series of works: carved white reliefs and paintings created with flat, thinly applied colour. Nicholson's close friend, Adrian Stokes, commented that the latter works explore, 'the inter-relationship of pure colour zones in which there is no graduation or alteration of texture' (see J. Russell, Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911-1968, London, 1969, p. 29). This is in marked contrast to the majority of Nicholson's oeuvre, where the artist's workings into the surface are clearly apparent. John Russell comments that in these paintings, 'we see for the first time the gamut of pure, clean, sharp and rather astringent colour which was henceforward to be one of the great attractions of Ben Nicholson's painting. This purified palette owed something to Mondrian. Certainly it was at a far remove from the savoury mixtures which were in favour elsewhere. There was a marine freshness about the colour in these new works, and a Naval high finish to their execution. The formal repertory was limited to the rectangle and the circle. Once again the architectural element was quite clear: one could almost build a house on the instructions implicit in some of these paintings. But, at the same time, what one could call the formal run-around related to something which had been taught in systematic style at the Bauhaus in the 1920s' ( ibid. ). The influence that these paintings had on contemporary architecture, in their ability to create space in their geometric colour, was emphasized by the constructive architect, Leslie Martin (see Architecture and the Painter with Special Reference to the work of Ben Nicholson, in Focus, no. 3, Spring 1939). In 1934 Nicholson first met Piet Mondrian at his studio in the rue de D‚part, Paris, and this visit made a lasting impression. He described the feeling in the studio as 'not unlike the feeling in one of those hermits' caves where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws' (see P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 39). Although Mondrian's influence on Nicholson is apparent in the use of areas of flattened geometrical colour and the balance achieved in the compositions, Nicholson's pared-down palette is significantly less restrictive than Mondrian's. 'Nicholson used colours in a variety of combinations which were never pure like Mondrian's but always complex and somewhat surprising. His paintings ranged from the intense to the ethereal, sometimes combining colours from both polarities. Just as the white reliefs became compositionally more complex so did the coloured abstract paintings' (see J. Lewison, Ben Nicholson, Oxford, 1991, p. 18). The colours that Nicholson used are not hung from a grid, as in Mondrian's work, but float freely. The effect achieved, of creating space through colour, predates Patrick Heron's theory expounded in his introduction to the catalogue of the group exhibition, Space in Colour, staged at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1953, 'the existence of pictorial space implies the partial obliteration of the canvas's surface from our consciousness. This is the r“le of colour: to push back or bring forward the required section of the design. The advance or recession of different colours in juxtapostion is a physical property of colour: it is a physical impossibility to paint shapes on a surface, using different colours in a variety of tones, and avoid the illusion of the recession of parts of that surface. Colour is therefore as powerful an agent of spatial expression as drawing... Tonal colour is thus the sole means of bestowing that physical vibrancy and resonance without which no picture is alive. And this vibration can be conveyed in 'hueless colours' - that is, in blacks, whites and greys - no less than by the full, chromatic range' (see V. Knight, Patrick Heron, Hatfield, 1988, p. 26). The present painting is similar in scale and composition to June 1937 (painting) (Tate Britain, London). The distribution of colours in this work, rescued from Nicholson's studio in The Mall by Adrian Stokes at the beginning of the Second World War, and taken to his garage in Cornwall for safety, has been compared to the arrangement of objects within a still life composition. This reading can also be applied to Composition with the L-shaped forms creating a feel of overlap and receeding space. Nicholson's writings on a comparable work, 1938 (painting - version I) (private collection), draw another influence into these large 1930s paintings. In 1950, when answering a questionnaire sent to him by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nicholson made a comparison with a 1895 poster by J. & W. Beggarstaff (the collaboration of his father, William Nicholson with his uncle, James Pryde), Girl Reading. Jeremy Lewison ( op. cit., p. 222) writes, 'Both the Nicholson and the Beggarstaff works rely on a strong contrast between white, grey, red and black, each colour being contained within a given form. Both stress flatness and suggest the use of stencils... The Beggarstaff Brothers' radical use of colour, their division of the surface into bold, simplified and clearly delineated shapes, their balance of form and colour must all have had a considerable impact on Nicholson'. Until 1990 the present work was in the possession of the sculptor, Denis Mitchell, who worked as a studio assistant to Barbara Hepworth in St Ives between 1949-59.
