Ben Nicholson

Lefevre Gallery, London

Gimpel Fils, London, until April 1958, as 1942 (H.S.)

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Their sale, Sotheby’s London, 20 November 1974, lot 181 (as Painting 1942)

Private Collection

Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s New York, 13 November 1996, lot 308 (as Painting 1942)

Private Collection, New York

Sale, Christie's London, 19 June 2018, lot 8, where acquired by the present owner

Brussels, Galerie Apollo, Ben Nicholson, May - June 1954, no. 9, as Peinture

Atlanta, High Museum of Art, on loan

Chichester, Pallant House, Ben Nicholson: from the Studio, 26 June - 24 October 2021, fig. 51

Executed during Nicholson’s wartime years in Cornwall, 1942 (H.S) stands as a distilled testament to the artist’s lifelong dialogue with modernism and his ability to internalise and reshape the formal vocabularies of European abstraction. With two planes of grey forming the background, 1942 (H.S) layers squares and rectangles in tones of chalk white, pale ochre, blue, black and a single, precise note of red. The result is architectural in construction but painterly in touch, a balance Nicholson spent the better part of a decade perfecting.

Nicholson had long been interested in spatial relationships and formal structure, but by 1942 his abstraction had softened, moving away from the purity of his earlier white reliefs and toward a more nuanced, chromatic vocabulary. In the current work, each shape seems to hover rather than sit, with borders that appear drawn as much by feeling as by geometry. What might initially seem rigid reveals itself to be delicately poised. This calibrated tension between structure and softness is what makes the painting so enduringly modern.

Though Nicholson never became a doctrinaire modernist, his work of this period is shaped by his sustained exchange with Piet Mondrian. Between 1938 and 1940, Mondrian lived next door to Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in Hampstead. The Dutch painter, then in his sixties and at a creative peak, brought with him a studio culture of intense order and abstraction. He repainted his rented room entirely in white, furnishing it with orange crates and kitchen chairs, all bleached to a uniform tone. Nicholson recalled admiring the intensity of Mondrian’s whites, and the precision with which every object in the room contributed to the whole.

"It's good to work with you," Mondrian wrote to Nicholson. "You are so precise. I find that precision is one of the most important things for anybody."  (Piet Mondrian, letter to Ben Nicholson, c.1938, cited in Carel Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, London 2001, p. 196.)

The influence on Nicholson was lasting, but not imitative. While Mondrian sought a universal harmony, banishing natural form and personal expression, Nicholson remained grounded in a more tactile and empirical approach. Mondrian saw art and architecture merging into a total environment, a vision he described in Circle in 1937 as a world where art would no longer be separate from life. His paintings did not reach out to encompass the world. They refined their own interior logic.

In 1942 (H.S), that logic is highly specific. The use of red, placed off-center, gives the work a gravitational pull, offset by paler, more atmospheric tones. The verticals and horizontals intersect with a quiet certainty, yet the boundaries of each shape retain a softness. The edges seem almost drawn rather than ruled, suggestive of an artist who has internalised structure so completely that he no longer needs to declare it. Nicholson had once been praised by Mondrian for his precision, but here precision does not mean rigidity. It means care.

“The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational but is both musical and architectural, when the architectural construction is used to express a "musical" relationship between form, tone and colour; and whether this visual "musical" relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is for me beside the point.” (The artist quoted in: Maurice de Sausmarez, Ben Nicholson, London 1969, p. 7).

This period, from 1940 to 1943, is widely considered one of Nicholson’s most assured. His travels to Paris had ceased. The international networks of the 1930s had scattered or gone silent. In their place, Nicholson focused inward, producing a series of works that moved beyond influence into quiet autonomy. These paintings are abstract, but they are not theoretical. They don’t explore geometry, but sensation. 1942 (H.S) in particular exemplifies a kind of concentrated modernism that sought clarity not through system, but through reduction and attention.

The present work comes with the distinguished provenance of Daniel Katz, one of the great British connoisseurs of the past fifty years. Known primarily for his expertise in Old Master sculpture, Katz’s interest in modern British art is guided by the same eye for proportion, surface, and form. That 1942 (H.S) sat alongside Roman portrait busts and 17th-century bronzes speaks to Nicholson’s own clarity of touch and structural sensitivity. 1942 (H.S) is a work that holds its own in any company, quietly but absolutely.