BEN NICHOLSON | May 24-52 (Red Yellow Blue)

W.R.R. Mewton, England (sale: Sotheby's, London, 10th November 1976, lot 147)
Crane Kalman Gallery, London (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection (acquired from the above; sale: Christie’s, London, 18th November 2005, lot 108)
Richard Green, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

London, Crane Kalman Gallery, The Nicholsons: Works by Sir William Nicholson, Ben Nicholson,Winifred (Dacre) Nicholson, Dame Barbara Hepworth, Mary Parke, George Howard, James Pryde, Nancy Nicholson, Kate Nicholson, Simon Nicholson, Rachel Nicholson, David Nicholson, Rafaele Nicholson, 1983, no. 15 (titled Red, Yellow, Blue, May 24, 1952) 

Herbert Read (ed.), Ben Nicholson, Work Since 1947, London, 1956, vol. II, no. 35, illustrated (titled May 1952)

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May 24-52 (Red Yellow Blue) is part of a sequence of accomplished abstract still lifes that Nicholson executed during the first half of the 1950s. This group of paintings represents the culmination of the artist's work in the still life, a genre  that he returned to throughout his career and one that defines ‘the works for which he is best known’ (Steven Nash, Ben Nicholson: Fifty Years of His Art (exhibition catalogue), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, 1978, p. 31). Compared with Nicholson's still lifes from the 1940s, these mature paintings are more architectural in feeling, Nicholson eliminates the expansive landscape background of earlier examples, often leaving only the suggestion of a window. The approach to form is broader and more abstract, and the fragmented volumes of the composition are opened up even further. It appears therefore that Nicholson’s interest is not so much in still life, but in the visual relationships that emerge between the shapes. Following the success of Nicholson’s acclaimed Festival of Britain Mural executed in 1951 he pushed the boundaries of abstraction within his work, specifically in the use of colour and line. Centring the present composition on three bold colour fields of red, yellow and blue the artist alludes to the land, sand and sky of his native Cornwall, reducing each to their simplest form. This technique brings to mind the late landscapes by J.M.W. Turner, which are similarly centred on broad swathes of intense colour. However, according to the artist himself, another source of inspiration was in fact looking towards the great master of the abstract still life, Pablo Picasso: ‘the real revelation came on a visit to Paris at the end of 1920 or Spring 1921. I remember suddenly coming across a Cubist Picasso at the end of a small upstairs room in Paul Rosenberg's gallery [...] it was what seemed to me then completely abstract and in the centre there was an absolutely miraculous green - very deep, very potent, and absolutely real’ (Ben Nicholson quoted in ibid., p. 9).



We are grateful to Dr Lee Beard for his assistance with the cataloguing of this work.