BEN NICHOLSON, O.M. | March 63 (Locmariaquer 2)

The Artist, from whom acquired by André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by Saul and Helen Schleuger, Seattle
Their sale, Sotheby's New York, 11th March 1998, lot 98
Sale, Sotheby's New York, 11th May 2000, lot 273 B
Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner

New York, André Emmerich Gallery and Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Ben Nicholson: 1955-1965, April 1965, cat. no.51.

The relief appears to be stable. There are a number of dents, scratches and incisions to the surface of the work where the Artist has worked the board. The board appears to be very slightly time stained. There is some very light surface dirt. This excepting the work appears to be in excellent overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is held behind glass in the Artist's original slip with an additional, later simple wooden frame on the outside. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

‘It is this harmony of the straight and curved lines uniting the different elements of which painting has consisted since its beginning – the plane, colour chiaroscuro, movement and rest, symbolic signs…which is the essence of his artistic adventure.’ (J.P. Hodin, ‘La Biennale di Venezia’, 1954, quoted in Herbert Read (intro.), Ben Nicholson: Work Since 1947 Volume 2, Lund Humphries, London, 1956) We are grateful to Dr Lee Beard for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

In 1957, Ben Nicholson met and married the young German photographer Felicitas Vogler and the following year they moved to Brissago in Switzerland overlooking Lake Maggiore. The marriage and move proved a catalyst for a renewed sense of purpose and productivity in Nicholson’s work, and specifically a return to the relief, with works such as March 63 (Locmariaquer 2). Writing to critic Adrian Stokes in 1967, Nicholson described the process: ‘The new material is a universal building material which comes from Sweden & Finland – it is very hard & unless reinforced is brittle. It is not pleasant to carve like wood bec. it’s’ a "dead" material but one becomes so keen on one’s idea that the dead material quickly becomes alive…’ (Ben Nicholson quoted in Jeremy Lewison, Ben Nicholson, exh. cat., Tate, 1993, p.92). Nicholson often turned to the chisel and even razor blades to score the surface of the reliefs. After carving and texturing the hardboard, Nicholson laid thinned oil into its surface, rubbing in and scrapping back layers, and then reapplying until medium and support become one.

In St Ives, Cornwall, where Nicholson and Hepworth had moved just before the outbreak of World War II, Nicholson was fascinated by local prehistoric sites where history, legend, religion and folklore intermingled imbuing the area with an indefinable charge. Travels across Europe introduced Nicholson to new sites ripe with beguiling mystery. Locmariaquer in Brittany holds two megalithic monuments, the ‘Er Grah de Locmariaquer’, a broken standing stone (menhir), and the ‘Table des Marchands’, the merchants’ table (dolmen). There was no clear link between a work and a place but rather the titles were bestowed once the work was complete: the reliefs become ‘memory-traces’ (Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: Drawings and Painted Reliefs, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2002, p.84). He called the later reliefs his ‘primitive reliefs’ – they spoke to the primeval, to landscapes that bore the traces of millennia of human existence. He wrote to his first wife, Winifred Nicholson, summarising the experience of flying home from the Venice Biennale in 1954: ‘I thought the S of France & Italy looked wonderful from the air – I liked the worked, scored surface – centuries of time & man – just the quality I’d like to get into a ptg.’ (Ben Nicholson quoted in Jeremy Lewison, op. cit. p.89).

In March 63 (Locmariaquer 2), Nicholson’s ambitions with the relief medium are synthesised into a work of restraint and delicacy, of tautly balanced composition and subtle colours. Nicholson deploys a sparse cast of formal elements, directing each line, recession, projection, angle and geometrical shape with precision in this condensed masterwork. Lines are surgically incised into the infinitely recessed layers of relief, subdividing the overall into various trapezoids. The architectonic internal structure is arranged with deliberation, each shape and shadow delineated with precision. A circle in the white rectangle to the lower left punctuates the relief, counterbalancing the perfectly ordered linearity. A restricted earthy palette of browns and white is absolutely united with the relief structure, the thinned oil permeates the board and form: ‘A late relief by Ben Nicholson…is a self-existent object whose colour, form and texture are to be appreciated as one, indivisible whole – a concrete reality in its own right.’ (Peter Khoroche, op. cit., p.84). March 63 (Locmariaquer 2) demands sustained contemplation: its austerity becomes mesmeric. As Nicholson explained in a letter to Geoffrey Gigson, the author of the introduction to his 1967 Marlborough Galleries exhibition, 'I think quietness is a miraculous & creative spirit' (Ben Nicholson, quoted in Peter Khoroche, op. cit., p.88).