Ben Nicholson, O.M.

Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery, London
Saidenberg Gallery, New York, where acquired by Mr & Mrs Arnold H. Maremont
Sir Martyn Beckett
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where acquired by the family of the present owners

London, Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery, Ben Nicholson: Paintings & Reliefs 1939-1945, October 1945, cat. no.37 (probably);  
Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, The Maremont Collection, April 1961, cat. no.90 (as Composition, 1954);
Washington D.C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Treasures of 20th Century Art from the Maremont Collection, 1st April - 3rd May 1967, cat. no.218 (as Composition, 1954).

The following report has been kindly prepared with the assistance of Stuart Sanderson, of Stuart Sanderson Paintings Conservation, 69 Rylett Crescent London W12 9RP. Structurally sound, there are one or two very slight, minor nicks to the extreme edges of the artist's board, visible upon very close inspection. The top edge near the right corner had received a slight knock. There was a small dent with some paint loss, and the board had got slightly compressed. The board was consolidated and stabilised with a thin solution of conservation grade PVA glue. The shallow dent was filled with a gesso type filler to match the character of the surrounding dry white paint. The filling was then colour matched with a thin layer of gouache. Elsewhere there is a further very minor scuff to the bottom left corner, and a slight area of possible rubbing to the bottom right corner of the right hand square, which may be in keeping with the artist's original technique. Ultraviolet light reveals a small area of fluorescence in keeping with the aforementioned spot of minor retouching, but this excepting there are no further areas of fluorescence or visible retouchings. Housed behind glass in a thick wooden frame, set on a larger backing board. 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.

 

During the 1930s Nicholson established himself as a major figure at the centre of the abstract modernist movement both in London and internationally. Invited to join the Paris-based association Abstraction-Création, he became a friend of Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Calder and Moholy-Nagy and his work was exhibited alongside these artists in New York, Amsterdam and Paris. His friendship with Mondrian, led to him inviting Mondrian to move to Hampstead – a centre for the vibrant community of European intellectuals in London. War changed all this: the art market virtually collapsed and artistic dialogue between England and the continent was severely limited as were the opportunities to exhibit and many of the international artists moved to America. This lead Herbert Read to write to Nicholson 'all we represent and have fought for is threatened’(Herbert Read in a letter to Nicholson, quoted in Chris Stephens, Ben Nicholson, Tate Publishing, London, 2008, p.57).

Despite the onset of the war, Nicholson was determined to keep Modernism alive: he encouraged young artists, kept up contacts with America and crucially continued painting. Moving to St Ives in 1939 had a profound effect on his art, and from this time, Nicholson returned to representational landscape painting as well as continuing with constructivist abstraction. However there is a distinct change in his abstract works of this period: the famous pure white reliefs of the 1930s developed into a series of reliefs of which 1939 (Painted Relief-Version 1) (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is an early example. In Composition 1944-5, painted at the close of the war years, has similarities to the 1939 relief. In both works Nicholson creates a balanced composition of squares, rectangles, and circles with strong horizontal and vertical lines. He introduces colour to these reliefs, contrasting sections of exposed, lightly rubbed hardboard with clear flat planes of pigment. With the introduction of tonal colour to the hand-crafted board, the abstract carved reliefs begin to take on landscape associations.

Elements from Nicholson’s landscape painting infiltrate these constructions not only through his colour scheme but also in the structure. The present work bares a remarkable similarity to 1943-5 (St Ives, Cornwall) (Tate, London) in which Nicholson creates a window frame, out of similar planes of colour. The red pigment also reoccurs in both works – in the landscape on the sails of a yacht and in the relief as a purely geometric shape. Composition 1944-5 is therefore an example of Nicholson’s ability to engage not only with the Modernist language of constructivism but also to combine this with his interest in English pastoral landscape. That this work sits so comfortably alongside the landscapes of the 1940s and also works when placed next to the white reliefs from the 1930s is testament to Nicholson’s great achievement in fusing both artistic languages. It is most likely with Nicholson in mind, that Read shows a renewed buoyancy regarding the fate of modernism: ` The Individuals in whom the spirit of modernism is embodied survive, still work, still create…’ (Herbert Read, `Threshold of a New Age: Renaissance or Decadence?’, World Review, June 1941, p.29).