Ben Nicholson O.M.

(British, 1894-1982)

Still Life 1945 30.9 x 28.8 cm. (12 1/4 x 11 3/8 in.) (including the artist's prepared backboard)

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Lefevre Gallery, London, where acquired by
Pamela White (1920-2013)
Thence by family descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Lefevre Gallery, cat.no.63

Still Life 1945 belongs to a small but elite group of works in which Nicholson depicts a Union Jack nestled amidst his more familiar still-life elements of cups and bowls. The flag's inclusion marks 8 May 1945, VE day, the official end date of WWII.

In 1939 at the outbreak of the war Nicholson and his second wife Barbara Hepworth moved their children from their Hampstead home to Carbis Bay, just outside of St. Ives. At first they stayed with Adrian Stokes and his wife Margaret Mellis, latterly finding their own accommodation where the family would remain to see out the war. Initially the couple, who were accustomed to life at the centre of the Hampstead avant-garde set, felt ostracised in their new locale but this soon wained and Nicholson chose to make the area his home until 1958. One frustration that did not abate until the end of the war was the stringency of the times, in terms of both sales of work and the availability of materials. The war years had not been easy for Nicholson, so it is fitting that he signified their end in the present work, but they do mark an important development within his oeuvre.

In the five years immediately prior to the move to St. Ives, Nicholson's output had been almost entirely pure in its abstract nature. However, surrounded by the emotive landscape of the Cornish coast, his work returned to the rhetoric of representational abstraction that he had developed in the years 1924-32. He had been greatly informed by his continental counterparts, particularly Braque and Cubism, as well as naïve imagery, notably by Alfred Wallis, and the theories exposed to him through his first wife, Winifred Nicholson's, engagement with Christian Science. Although representational, Nicholson referred to his paintings as 'ideas', not as depictions of physical objects or space but the spirit that lay within them. Following the break-out of war Nicholson returned to this practice but the works from 1939-1958 are more cohesive in a personally identifiable aesthetic than the formative period. This developed with a distinct use of material and method. 'Weathering' of the support by scraping back applied layers of wash, oil or even the board itself became more regular and the integration between compositional elements made up of heavily worked pencil or flatly applied bold blocks of oil became more defined.

Nicholson's work developed three strands; landscapes, still lifes and abstracts, and very broadly speaking throughout his career, Nicholson would paint landscapes when in rural locations such as Cumberland and St. Ives and still lifes when in more urban areas. The present work was executed in London and the colours Nicholson employs are bold; pillar-box red, deep blue and 'poisonous' yellow. This brightening of palette, and an overall increased importance of colour to Nicholson, coincided with his move to St. Ives but is used irrespective of location.

Nicholson spent April to December of 1945 in London. In October he had his first post-war one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery and in spite of the austerity of the day, it was a commercial success. The Tate gallery purchased two works; 1945 (still life) and 1943-5 (St Ives, Cornwall). Like the present example, the latter of the Tate's purchases also includes the Union Jack motif. Another example, 1945 (still life with 3 mugs) (Private Collection), was included in a major 1994 Nicholson Tate retrospective and a third, 1945 (still life with flag), is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The present work comes to the market for the first time since its acquisition from the Lefevre Gallery in the late 1940s by Ms Pamela White, whom Nicholson listed amongst the collectors of his work in Herbert Read's 1955 Ben Nicholson, Volume 1 monograph.