Ben Nicholson, O.M. 1894-1982

Duncan MacDonald
Lefevre Gallery, London (as 'Painting, 1945')
Marlborough Fine Art, London, whence acquired by Mr and Mrs Kreitman, October 1970

London, Tate Gallery, Ben Nicholson, October 1993- January 1994, no.84, pp.165 and 225, illustrated in colour twice in the exhibition catalogue;
St. Etienne, Musée d'Art Moderne (British Council Visual Arts Department exhibition), Ben Nicholson, February - May 1994, no.84;
Valencia, Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Ben Nicholson, April - July 2002, no.78, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.

John Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson: Drawings, Paintings and Reliefs 1911-1968, Thames and Hudson, London 1969, no.47, illustrated (as 'circa 1945 (Untitled)').

Like his contemporaries, Nicholson had found the war years very limiting to his art in many ways, from the basic difficulty of obtaining materials, to the problems of exhibiting, publishing and selling one’s work.

As WWII drew to a close, whilst these problems were not immediately eased, the lifting of the spirits begin to show themselves in his paintings and the variety of the works produced in the 1944-45 period is extremely noticeable. The Cornish landscapes, such as 1944 (Higher Carnstabba Farm) (Private Collection) and 1945 (St.Ives) (Private Collection), with their predominately figurative content sit at the side of the small and amusing ‘playing card’ paintings, such as 1945 (playing cards) (Private Collection), and yet are still contemporary with fully-developed painted abstracts, such as 1945 (2 circles) (Stromness, Pier Arts Centre), that move this element of his work a further step on from the pre-war images.  

Within this wonderfully fecund body of work are a group of paintings that, whilst physically small, are not only extremely beautiful, but also give a very clear indication of the direction Nicholson’s painting would follow for at least the next decade.

The present work incorporates both drawing and painting and, like 1945 (2 circles) (Stromness, Pier Arts Centre), explores the ideas of complex overlapping planes to create spatial depth within the composition. Nicholson seems to have been influenced in this by the work of the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a friend and Hampstead neighbour, whose compositions of the 1920’s and 1930’s had incorporated this same idea, which in turn he may have derived from the examples of Klee and Kandinsky. However, by the early 1940’s, Moholy-Nagy was developing a means of creating an actual third dimension within his work by painting partly on the support, usually board, and partly on a plexiglass sheet mounted above the support, as in Space Modulator 1939-45 (New York, Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum). Thus, the shadows of the latter create an ever-changing third layer between the two painted layers. Nicholson’s compositions share this sense of developing distance between the elements of composition, but here this is achieved through his mastery of line. The pencil drawing creates a complicated network of balanced forms, with small areas of thinned and rubbed oil used to block certain areas and use them as the structural supports for the lines. Deft shading further develops the illusion of space, and the composition is then anchored around three circles, one of which also uses shading to give the suggestion that it may actually be carved into the board. In this he is playing with the viewer in the way that can also be seen in his most closely related contemporary painting, 1945 (parrot’s eye) (Private Collection) where he actually does carve one circle into the board, but by shading around another, creates the illusion of that one really standing proud of the surface.

The importance of the drawn and shaded line as an integral part of the composition would be a key element in virtually all of Nicholson’s work until the late 1950’s, a period in which he achieved huge international recognition, and thus we can see how crucial works such as 1945 (composition) are to our understanding of one of the most important phases of his career.