Ben Nicholson

André Emmerich Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1962

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Ben Nicholson, 1961, no. 6

Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, Ben Nicholson, 1976, no. 14

Very good condition. Wonderful surface and colors are fresh.
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In 1958 Ben Nicholson left St. Ives, the Cornish fishing town and artists’ colony which had been his home in Britain for over twenty years, for Ticino, the southern-most canton in Switzerland. The move occasioned a remarkably productive period for Nicholson and, as Norman Reid notes, his work took on a new range and confidence: "The uncompromising breadth and statement which had informed the major works of the thirties, and which had not been so evident in the more generally linear works of the forties and early fifties, returned to his art. […] The works of this period rely less upon the tension of Nicholson’s line and the elegance of his composition and more upon his ability to concentrate experience in the discovery of form. […] They convey the essence of landscapes as the artist has experienced them and their mood as he has recalled it" (Norman Reid, ‘Introduction’ in Ben Nicholson (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1969, pp. 53-55).

 

The present work epitomizes the mature, balanced style of the artist’s 1960s work. In July 1960 (Cyclades 2), Nicholson's abiding preoccupation with the natural world and his joy in his new surroundings are evident. He revels in the use of naturalistic color, rare for an ambitious abstract work at the time. Nicholson saw colors as revealed in the qualities of a particular light and in the present work he particularizes the vital transition from a rich earthen red to a pure bright white.

The new home environment and Nicholson’s more extensive travel program had made their mark on his art of the period and, as is the case for the present work, many works refer to a particular place in their subtitles. At times these words refer to a specific form or relationship of forms; more often they indicate a broader response, to space, mass, light. As Nicholson himself expressed at the time of his move: "The landscape in Switzerland is superb, especially in winter and when seen from the changing levels of the mountain side - 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 and with the kind of visual poetry which I would like to find in my paintings" (S. A. Nash, Ben Nicholson Fifty Years of his Art (exhibition catalogue), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, p. 38).

It is perhaps Nicholson’s success in perfecting this balancing act with the net of ideas that make up both his and our own memories of such sources that makes July 1960 (Cyclades 2) such a powerful painting. The apparently simple combination of forms creates both harmony and disturbance, and should one wish to draw suggestions of sources, including landscape, there are opportunities. Yet one is very well aware that this is at heart also an abstract painting, an heir to the great essays in non-figurative abstraction of the inter-war period.