Ben Nicholson

Gimpel Fils, London
F.L.S. Murray, London (possibly purchased from the above)
Lefevre Gallery, London
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Private Collection, Germany
Thence by descent to the present owner

Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard & Hannover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Ben Nicholson, 1959, no. 14

Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson, paintings, reliefs, drawings, London, 1955, vol I, no. 150c, illustrated n.p.

The board and artist's frame are stable, with the upper and lower edges very gently bent. UV light examination reveals tiny flecks of fluorescence in places, pertaining to the pigments. There is a tiny spot of paint loss to the upper part of the right edge and some light wear to all four corners. There are some scattered, extremely fine lines of craquelure, predominantly along the upper and lower edges and probably related to the very slight bend of the board. This work is in overall good condition.
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Still Life, June 16-1947 exemplifies Ben Nicholson’s post-war turn to pared-down compositions that negotiate the interplay of abstract and figurative forms. The artist was turning away from rigorous abstraction towards a formalism of quotidian objects of domestic life as well as a topography of the Cornish landscape. David Lewis, a British architect who worked as an artist assistant in St Ives, notes that though the vocabulary of Nicholson’s paintings ‘was invariably the intersecting outlines of bottles, jugs and wine glasses … [their] language … was landscape’ (David Lewis, ‘Scratching the Surface, Tate Etc., Issue 13: Summer 2008).

This new style propelled Nicholson to national fame in the following decade. He had been honoured as early as 1943 by Lund Humphries' commission of a publication that handsomely reproduced his paintings, reliefs and drawings, but it was during the decades following the war, when Nicholson repeatedly represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and received the royal honour of the Order of Merit, that he solidified his pre-eminent position among British artists.

Nicholson’s work can be seen to bridge the gap between the parochial styles of St Ives locals, like Alfred Wallis, and the austere abstract Constructivism of Continental counterparts like Piet Mondrian. However, unlike the gridded canvases of Mondrian, which exemplify organised composure, Nicholson’s surfaces are often rough and gritty. Their texture reflects the physicality of his working process: the genesis of each new work would begin at the close of a previous working day, when Nicholson washed down the boards of a kitchen table he used as a palette with turpentine, then poured the viscous conglomerate of turpentine and oils onto whatever––paper, canvas or board––was to hand. This would form what he called a new work’s ‘ground’, the accidental forms and colours he contemplated in search of inspiration. Once it was found he would scrape through this ground with a blade. This visceral process created ghost forms, or palimpsests, that would lie beneath his still lifes. In Still Life, June 16-1947 geometric blocks of opaque colour abut jugs and glasses that are abbreviated as two-dimensional objects described with spare black lines. Our gaze is unable to settle on either jug or abstract composition and instead oscillates between the different layers of the work.