Ben Nicholson O.M.

(British, 1894-1982)

Project 20.4 x 20.9 cm. (8 x 8 1/4 in.)

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, May 1947

By late 1932 Ben Nicholson and his first wife Winifred Nicholson's relationship was extremely strained. Winifred, with their two children, moved from Cornwall to Paris staying in the 16th arrondissement. Ben, who was increasingly splitting his time between Hampstead (close to Barbara Hepworth, whom he would marry in 1938) and Winifred, began to make regular trips from London to Paris. There in the centre of international modernism he forged relationships with Picasso, Braque, Calder, Moholy-Nagy and significantly Mondrian. From 1932 onwards Nicholson's work had moved increasingly towards pure abstraction and by February 1934 he had begun to make his celebrated white reliefs. Later that year he was invited to join the Paris-based association Abstraction-Création. Until 1939, when he would re-engage with representational painting, Nicholson held the position of Britain's foremost advocate of geometrical-abstraction within the modernist movement.

Nicholson first visited Piet Mondrian's Parisian studio on 5 April 1934 and an ongoing dialogue between the two artists soon followed. In 1938, on Nicholson's recommendation, Mondrian moved to London living close to Ben in Hampstead. At this period Nicholson reintroduced colour to some of his carved reliefs and also executed a number of geometrical abstractions in oils. Although these employed formal elements similar to Mondrian they relied to a greater extent on the use of colour to suggest the possibility of space in a constructivist manner. In some examples the genesis of the composition from a table top still-life is left tangible. Although Nicholson did not continue a strict application of abstraction from 1939 onwards in all of his output, he did continue to explore it at points throughout his career.

The present example, dating from 1945, is reminiscent of the geometrical canvases Nicholson executed between 1934 and 1938 but is less exacting in its hard-edged nature. Project possesses a hand-made surface quality. The boundaries between the upper elements are left exposed so that these areas appear placed together rather than forming a singular space. In the upper left a horizontal pencil line bisects the composition, again deliberately interrupting the space. The lower passage of the work is formed of vertical rectangular forms, which may have originated from still-life elements such as bottles. Tonally the work is organic, reflecting Nicholson's engagement with landscape in the 1940s. Yet two distinct juxtapositions are formed within this palette; between the scarlet and burgundy components and the powder blue and black components. Nicholson had previously employed such a device in works such as 1940-2 (two forms) (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), in which Jeremy Lewison's reading of the forms being derived from still-life objects is persuasive in suggesting a similar origin for the present composition.

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.