Ben Nicholson O.M.

(British, 1894-1982)

Painted Relief 1941 76.2 x 102.9 cm. (30 x 40 1/2 in.) (including the artist's prepared backboard)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by
C.S. Reddihough (by 1948)

Exhibited
Bradford, Cartwright Memorial Hall, Golden Jubilee Exhibition; Fifty Years of British Art, 19 March-8 June 1954, cat.no.487
Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, British Art and the Modern Movement 1930-40, 13 October-25 November 1962

Literature
Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson, Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings, Volume 1, Lund Humphries, London, 1948, pl.116 (ill.b&w)

Painted Relief 1941 is exceptionally eloquent in its execution. It consists of nine distinct compositional elements, separated by seven shallow carved planes and two linear elements; the circle and the horizontal line in the upper right-hand passage (both of which had become iconic devices of Nicholson's carved reliefs). These forms harmoniously interlock on a considered and impressive scale, confronting the viewer with a restful and balanced, yet powerful presence. Unusually, and most informatively, Nicholson has denoted the colour make-up of the present work through a series of inscriptions on the backboard. He notes that the "Pale" and "Dark" L-shaped elements are mixed of the same two pigments in varying ratio, the larger "Green Form" of five, and the upper "Grey" of a further two. This rare insight into the colour mixing technique of Nicholson, particularly the tonal symmetry in the manufacture of the L-shaped elements, illustrates that the calculated and measured approach undertaken is as elegant as the resulting aesthetic. The work is a triumph of Nicholson's innovation of relief as a medium, an avenue he had first explored eight years earlier.

In December of 1933 whilst in Paris, Nicholson produced the first of his reliefs. These boards, carved into in shallow geometric planes, were initially coloured and then from the following year until 1937 many were painted solely in white. Throughout the mid-1930s Nicholson was engaged in an exchange of concepts with Piet Mondrian, whose influence is critical within Nicholson's bold embrace of abstraction. Both Nicholson's reliefs and Mondrian's paintings hung side by side in key modernist displays such as the fourth 'Abstraction-Création' exhibition in Paris in 1934 and 'Abstract and Concrete' at London's Lefevre Gallery in 1936 as well as both featuring in Faber & Faber's 1937 publication Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. Pioneering in their absolute abstract conception, the white reliefs are arguably both Ben Nicholson's most celebrated achievements and the most crucial contributions to modernist British art and the international visual dialogue in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1939, with war looming, Nicholson moved his family (Barbara Hepworth and their triplets) to the remote Cornish peninsula. The family initially lodged with the art critic Adrian Stokes and his artist wife Margaret Mellis before taking their own accommodation in Carbis Bay. St Ives was to become Ben Nicholson's home until 1958 and home to Barbara Hepworth for the rest of her life. For both artists, the move heralded developments in personal approach as well as the establishment of the 'St Ives' artist's colony which yielded an immensely rich artistic output from the war-time and post-war periods.

Painted Relief 1941 dates from Nicholson's pivotal early Cornish years, a period in which colour in an organic palette was reintroduced to the previously pure white reliefs. One such relief, Painted Relief 1939, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (see Fig.1) was acquired at the behest of Alfred Barr and with assistance from H.S. Ede in exchange for an earlier white relief which it was considered to supersede. In these works tones of azure, ochre, almond and rust drawn from the surrounding landscape feature and in some instances, as in the present work, these are logically arranged with the steely ice-blue sky running along the upper edge of the work above the earthy red-brown below. This subtle amalgamation of tangible depiction into his absolute abstract idiom, marks for Nicholson a personal victory in the battle for the abstract cause. Writing to Herbert Read in 1942 Nicholson remarked; 'In the new pted reliefs & ptgs I've done lately there seems to be an extra almost naturalistic "reality" something to do with a future of shadows in & out & through sunlight. So that's all v naturalistic really? Like Greek or Tibetan temples against a land or seascape' (Jeremy Lewison, Ben Nicholson, The Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p.233). Nicholson's new 'naturalistic reality' synchronises with developments of what he would consider to be some rather unlikely allies; the neo-romantic artists.

In the early war years the Neo-Romantics turned to England's green and pleasant lands and found sanctuary from conflict on the continent, both in warfare and in art. Virginia Button notes 'The theme of liberation was central to the Neo-Romantic opposition to the rhetoric of 'significant form', representing the liberation of English art from the shackles of the school of Paris and its seductive but sterile plastic values. Although far from endorsing the aesthetic standpoint of Neo-Romanticism, Nicholson's statement nevertheless shares the ideology of individual freedom that was at the heart of Neo-Romanticism' (ibid, p.60). She quotes Nicholson:

I think the recent liberation of the powerful forces of form and colour is an important event, and when critics announce and foretell the death of abstract art they show the same misunderstanding of the freedom of form and colour as the dictators' do of the individual. (Horizon 4, 'Notes on Abstract Art', October 1941, p.273).

Although Nicholson had produced representational works in the immediate pre and early war years, they were considered by him as a separate venture, and often a commercial necessity in times of such austerity. Therefore, his tentative embrace of this recent practice to combine "freedom of form and colour" is a significant development. It allowed his focus thenceforth to oscillate between abstraction and representation. This, he would do sometimes wholly and sometimes within the same composition. The results are the major still-lifes, table-tops and landscape compositions that he executed throughout the late 1940s and 1950s (see Towednack lot 15).

It was perhaps the crucial integration of landscape reference within Painted Relief 1941 which Cyril Reddihough first engaged with. Throughout his patronage of Nicholson, landscapes were central to the relationship. The early acquisition of the masterpiece 1928 (Pill Creek-Cornwall) (see lot 6), the poetic prose of his 1930 Lefevre catalogue introduction and the drawing trips planned together in the 50s all indicate that Reddihough responded strongly to Nicholson's engagement with landscape.

It is known that Reddihough visited Nicholson in St Ives at least twice in the 1940s. First in April of 1941 and again in 1946. The present work is inscribed on the back board in Nicholson's hand with two addresses. First is the Dunluce address the artist resided at from Christmas 1939 until July 1942 (and where Reddihough would have made his first visit). This has been crossed out and amended to the Chy-an-Kerris address at which he lived from July 1942 and where Reddihough visited in 1946. It is not known on which occasion (if indeed either, rather than by letter request) Reddihough acquired Painted Relief 1941 but a price of £350 is recorded and the work is listed in the collection of Reddihough by 1948 when published in Herbert Read's monograph (see literature reference above). Irrespective of the exact details of the acquisition, the purchase of such a major work for such a sizable sum in the midst of stringent times would have been greatly welcomed. Letters from Nicholson's first wife Winifred to Reddihough testify to his generosity in providing money for new clothes for Ben's children, only surpassed by his relentless support of the artist through acquisition.