Ben Nicholson, O.M.

Marlborough Fine Art, London, where acquired by Solomon B. Smith in 1967
Gifted by the above to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1982

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ben Nicholson: Twelve New Works, June 1967, cat. no.7;
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Ben Nicholson: Fifty Years of His Art, 20th October - 26th November 1978, cat. no.77, illustrated, with tour to Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington and the Brooklyn Museum, New York;
Hayam, Japan, The Museum of Modern Art, Ben Nicholson, 7th - 28th Febuary 2004, cat. no.82, illustrated, with tour to Japan Aici Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya and Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo.

John Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson, Drawings, Paintings and Reliefs 1911-1968, Thames & Hudson, London, 1969, cat. no.258, illustrated.

Sound board. There are some small possible traces of studio detritus or handling marks apparent upon extremely close inspection, with some very minor traces of surface dirt and matter within the box frame. This excepting the work appears in excellent original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed in a thin light wooden box frame, behind glass. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Lee Beard for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

Nicholson left St Ives in 1958 after two decades living and working in the Cornish coastal town. He had recently met, and married, the photographer Felicitas Vogler and moved to a new life in the mountains of Switzerland which heralded an Indian summer for the artist, opening up the next chapter in a career already filled with achievement. Nicholson and Vogler built a new house and studio above Brissago in the Ticino, with a breathtaking view overlooking Lago Maggiore: 'The landscape is superb..The persistent sunlight, the bare trees seen against a translucent lake, the hard, rounded forms of the snow topped mountains, and perhaps with a late evening moon rising beyond in a pale, cerulean sky is entirely magical with the kind of poetry which which I would like to find in my painting' (the Artist, 1959, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon Press, London, 1993, p.311).

His work of the 1950s had been dominated by the still life-influenced paintings that grew out of his wartime work but his 'magical' new environment initiated a return to the pared-down forms of his paintings and reliefs of the 1930s, although combined with a greater freedom with scale and colour. Nicholson's choice of materials was a significant contributor to this. Whilst the early reliefs had mostly used natural woods, he increasingly turned to commercially produced composite hardboards. Much harder to work than wood, Nicholson found that this aided the process of creation by slowing and intensifying the physical approach to the material and thus allowing his expression of an idea to become more channelled. This concept of a struggle with the material was one which clearly struck Nicholson, and in a letter to his friend Adrian Stokes he used a most interesting metaphor to express this:

'I like the tough resistance of material bec. it forces one into a feeling for it & for the "idea". A little bit like my poodle Black Billy who tugs at a paint rag & the more I pull the more he growls & harder he pulls, in fact rather a good description of making a relief?' (the Artist, correspondence with Adrian Stokes 15th May 1964, TGA). 

The uniform flat surface and texture of the hardboard, both in its prime state and once worked, also provided a very good base for the limited range of colours with which Nicholson worked throughout the 1960s. Although he had experimented with such colouring before, such as in Painted Relief, 1935 (Private Collection), the use of such a limited palette, enlivened by the different effects that were achieved once applied to the worked surface, gives the works of this period an entirely different character. 1967 (silver brown) exemplifies his best paintings from the decade which often have an almost organic character or suggest the weathered and aged surface of antiquities and make for a very contemplative serenity, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves in the intricate balance and counterpoint of the forms. 

In his monograph on Nicholson's reliefs, Peter Khoroche discusses the way in which the works of this period seem to echo some of the zen-influenced aesthetic concepts such as wabi and sabi, and whilst Nicholson's direct knowledge of such notions is uncertain, these ideas were very much part of the life and work of his friends and fellow St Ives artists, the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada whose own pieces were in the collections of virtually all those of Nicholson's circle. Moreover, in the Ticino, he became close to Julius Bissier, who moved to Ascona in 1961 and would have no doubt shared his profound knowledge of Oriental philosphy.