Ben Nicholson

In November 1960, Nicholson was looking forward to moving into the new house and studio that he and his wife Felicitas Vogler were having built in Gadero, in the municipality of Brissago, Switzerland. With the promise of compelling views across Lake Maggiore being constantly present, Nicholson jokily enthused to his ex-wife Winifred that they had even got some of ‘the mountains in the right place without going to the expense of moving them’. November 1960 (Anne) was larger than the small-scale reliefs which Nicholson had been making for the previous five years, in Cornwall and then in his first two years in Switzerland. This change was partly in response to the scale of the landscape in which he found himself. The work has a rectilinear quality, and the carved relief at its centre is composed from quadrilaterals. Rather than execute these shapes with sharp-edged right-angles, Nicholson shaped each carved area with tapered outlines: each shape is subtly irregular, presenting a frontal appearance of a foreshortened square, as if the surface were tilting. As well as registering the scale of the landscape in which it was made, November 1960 (Anne) also uses unresolved applications of paint on the backboard around the central relief; these areas of freely brushed lines introduce a suggestion of atmosphere, in contrast to the defined edges and uniform surfaces of the carved relief. The title of the work is an anomaly. Nicholson scholars have so far been unable to identify the eponymous ‘Anne’. The artist once referred to his bracketed subtitles as ‘luggage tags’, never intending them to refer to any representational content in a work. Nicholson had a lifelong love of animals, especially cats, which he shared with his third wife, Vogler, and it is plausible that the title was taken from a pet. * In March 1958, Ben Nicholson left his home and studio in St Ives for Switzerland. He settled near Lake Maggiore and began a period marked by its fluency and self-confidence. In Switzerland, he produced reliefs, landscapes and still lifes, further establishing his reputation not only as one of Britain’s leading modernists but also as an artist of international acclaim. Following a decade of awards and critical celebration, including the ‘Ulissi’ Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the First International Prize for Painting at São Paulo in 1957, Nicholson was buoyed with enthusiasm and creative zeal. His move to mainland Europe marked the start of a remarkable and prolific period in his exceptional oeuvre. Nicholson’s work of the 1960s was shaped by an intense engagement with his surroundings: the striking landscapes and historical sites which he encountered in the Canton of Ticino, as well as those he discovered on travels to Italy, Greece, Portugal and France. Pencil drawing and carved painted relief were parallel mediums in Nicholson’s practice at the time, and he used both as vehicles of expression to capture the ‘idea’ of these newly discovered European environments. Though his work was not always representational, it was systematically related to the places he experienced. Working as a kind of equivalent, his abstract reliefs of this period suggest the weathered patina of ancient buildings. Nicholson used a direct and physical process, scratching the hard board and scraping away layers of applied paint. By roughening and incising the support and revealing underlayers of wood and colour, Nicholson composed a subtly interlocking surface notable for its rich textures. While the reliefs were composed in Nicholson’s studio, the drawings flowed directly from his encounters with life outside and were often spurred by an interest in architecture – the tympanum over a doorway, an idiosyncratic capital or the characterful silhouettes of a townscape. Much like the reliefs, the drawings developed from a pure interest in shape and line. Though the drawings are artistic achievements in their own right, they helped Nicholson to distil his idea of a place and communicate it in the abstract, poetic qualities of his carved reliefs.