Ben Nicholson O.M.

(British, 1894-1982)

Two Forms 23.8 x 21.6 cm. (9 3/8 x 8 /12 in.) (including the artist's prepared backboard)

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Lefevre Gallery, London, where acquired by
Wright S. Ludington Esq., Philadelphia
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 23 June 1999, lot 69, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

By the time Ben Nicholson drew and painted Two Forms, in 1947, he had already produced an impressive body of abstract works. From his earliest efforts with abstraction, those handful of paintings made in the early 1920s, through the white reliefs of the early 1930s and the more hard-edged colourful compositions informed by the Constructivist movement later that decade, Nicholson had a masterful command of what was seen by many in Britain as a radical new pictorial language. Influenced by many sources, Cubism from Paris and the works of Moholy-Nagy, Malevich and Kandinsky among others, he succeeded in rarely being derivative.

As World War II drew to a close he embarked on what is often seen as his most successful and creative period of his whole career. The mid to late 1940s saw him produce a variety of purely abstract works, as seen in Two Forms, alongside more representational art which incorporated simplified and fragmented still-lifes before various Cornish landscapes, such as 1947, December 13 (Trendine 2) in The Phillips Collection, Washington. The artist's own writings on abstract art are the best insight into their development and objectives:

'At first the circles were freely drawn and the structure loose with accidental textures, later I valued more the direct contact that could be obtained by flat planes of colour made and controlled to an exact pitch and the greater tension obtainable by the use of true circles and rectangles – the superficial appeal became less, but the impact of the idea more direct and therefore more powerful. The geometric forms often used by abstract artists do not indicate, as has been thought, a conscious and intellectual mathematical approach – a square or a circle in art are nothing in themselves and are alive only in the instinctive and inspirational use an artist can make of them in expressing a poetic idea.' (Ben Nicholson, Notes on "Abstract" Art in Ben Nicholson, Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings, Volume I, Lund Humphries, London, 1955, pp.25-26)

When a particular design and colour scheme appealed to Ben Nicholson it was not unusual for him to reproduce them with minor alterations between works. Two Forms, a small but powerful gem of a painting is one such example the artist deemed worthy of exploring further. Others are project (pyramid), March-47 and painting (J.L.M.) February 2-47.