Ben Nicholson, O.M.

Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, where purchased by Mr Morris Bergreen, 27th August 1968

New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery and André Emmerich Gallery, Ben Nicholson 1955 - 1965, April 1965, cat. no.71.

The board appears sound. There are a few very light surface scuffs to the work. There are some very light traces of surface dirt and studio detritus. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is float mounted in a simple, square-profile aluminium tray 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.

Ben Nicholson made his first relief on a trip to Paris in 1933. Whilst working on a painting, part of the thick white prepared ground chipped off, leaving two distinct levels, inspiring him to make a series of reliefs in the following years. This happy accident was to prove a decisive turning-point for his work, and he is perhaps best known today for his subtle, balanced reliefs, such as the present lot.  

Nicholson's minimalist white reliefs of the 1930s are typically pared back, built up using simple geometric forms, and with a focus on light and shadow, enabled by the artist’s use of a uniform surface. The relief was a medium which Nicholson would revisit later in his career, with a renewed energy: following a move to Switzerland in 1958, he returned to the medium, but with an entirely new approach. Instead of the smooth, even white surfaces of works such as 1935 (White Relief) (National Galleries of Scotland), Nicholson began to produce more colourful works, often with an intricately worked ground, the surfaces scrubbed and lightly pitted. Set in counterpoint against these elements were the increasingly complex forms of the relief itself, often with details added in pencil or highlighted with more intense areas of oil paint.

The present work is a perfect example of this return to the relief medium, yet executed with a greater freedom. 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 subtly worked surface and delicately balanced composition of dec 63 (pillar with circle) renders it one of his most successful works of the period. It possesses an almost organic character, suggesting the weathered and aged surface of antiquities, inspiring in the viewer an immersive and contemplative serenity.

The tranquillity of the work is undoubtedly linked to Nicholson’s move to Switzerland in 1958. Together with his new wife, the photographer Felicitas Vogler, Nicholson built a house and studio above Brissago in the Ticino, with a breathtaking view overlooking Lago Maggiore. Eloquently describing the profound effect this new landscape had on his work, Nicholson noted that: ’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 I would like to find in my painting' (the Artist, 1959, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon Press, London, 1993, p.311). dec 63 (pillar with circle) is imbued with references to this ‘magical’ landscape: from the earthy, naturalistic tones, to the towering pillar reminiscent of the vertiginous terrain, and the perfect circle, evocative of a rising moon, it is a work which powerfully demonstrates Nicholson’s love of his Swiss surroundings.