Ben Nicholson, O.M. 1894-1982

Based on the 1967 etching Two Sculptural Forms.

Whilst Nicholson is not unusual amongst the artists of his generation in producing a large body of printed works throughout his career, he is almost unique in the ways in which he was able to break boundaries and bring this oeuvre into the main corpus of his output. Although he had experimented to great success with the printed medium from the later 1920s, it was through his partnership with the master printmaker François Lafranca in the 1965-68 period that Nicholson was able to produce works which so ably combined the printed and painted media.

His usual practice was to produce an image which Lanfranca bit and pulled in a number of variants with the eventual aim being an edition of 50. However, Nicholson seems to have rarely granted Lafranca ‘bon-a-tirer’, and even within the editions the variance of the various qualities are very noticeable.

Several of the proofed images were never fully editioned and these frequently became the basis for ‘working on’ (the artist usually, as here, termed these ‘mixed media on an etched ground’), a process which included a huge level of freedom, even to the extent of reversing proofs and drawing and painting on the relief surface of the reverse.