Ben Nicholson

December 1933 (first completed relief), previously known as ‘Two Circles’, is a canonical artwork in the history of European modernist art. Ben Nicholson’s reliefs of the nineteen-thirties are among his foremost contributions to the Modernist movement, and this work belongs near the beginning of a sequence of stylistic progression that led rapidly to the white reliefs of 1934. Through Nicholson’s own efforts, December 1933 (first completed relief) has been regarded since the nineteen-forties as a pivotal work in his development. The title, ‘first completed relief’, implies that it may not have been the first work he carved into; it is rather the first relief in which he realised an ‘idea’ and a sense of artistic completion. It was made in Paris during a visit to see his children Jake, Kate and Andrew and their mother Winifred Nicholson, whom Nicholson had gradually separated from in 1931–32. It was made in a period of acute discovery in which personal and artistic breakthroughs were inseparable, with his burgeoning relationship with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth encouraging the development of depth and tactility in his own work. Nicholson had been scraping his paintings for several years previously, creating heavily work, multi-layered surfaces, and in December 1933 (first completed relief) he worked through this theme and made a break from producing the illusion of depth to a literal displacement of space by carving out shallow volumes from the surface.

Two letters from Nicholson to Hepworth in December 1933 refer to his early adventures in relief carving. In the first he described how he and the children had used one carved relief as a ‘primitive’ marble run, as well as referring to the carpenter in Hampstead from whom he acquired the materials to work upon:

"I did a very amusing thing yesterday. I carved it all day long it is about 2ice the size of this sheet of notepaper & loops like a section of some primitive game. Jake & Kate came in at various stages & we rolled a marble about on it. I am enjoying working as never before. […] I wish I had some more of those boards I got off that carpenter—they are ideal for my new work. I must trace him & trace the place in Camden Town he got them from."

In his following letter, Nicholson described ‘a thing I made’, apparently a long rectangular board with three carved circles ‘cut out different depths & with the circles set in at different slopes’. This was placed on the mantelpiece with a marble and coins nestled on the ledge of the carved area. Shortly after this time, December 1933 (first completed relief) was pictured in a photograph with Ben and Winifred’s son Jake. Another photograph of Winifred’s flat at Quai d’Auteuil shows a detail of the first completed relief alongside other boards worked with relief carving.

The first completed relief is closely related to a number of hard-worked paintings and early reliefs of late 1933 and early 1934. These were so heavily worked in part because, as Nicholson wrote later, ‘Barbara [Hepworth]’s sculptor’s tools [were] lying around.’ The open grained material quality and the inexact, handmade delineations in these works are richly suggestive of handicraft. A closely related work, the second relief to be completed by Nicholson—1933 (six circles)—uses the same relation of larger and smaller circles, a containing rectangle subdivided into a jigsaw pattern of further rectangles, and a narrow palette of finely graded brown, terracotta, ochre, cream and white colours. At this moment in Nicholson’s career, no circle was drawn exactly, but rather imperfectly as an area of colour or an organic orb, and areas of colour often align inexactly with rectilinear silhouettes (either carved or delineated in pencil). Nicholson’s circles of this period are sometimes playfully suggestive: one work—1933 (vertical painting)—seems to depict the finger loop of a yo-yo string. The hand-worked quality of surfaces and outlines is witty and joyous too, and simple geometric forms frequently vibrate with the artist’s humour and vitality.

Nicholson’s desire to cut through the surface and ‘develop this lower level’ had a metaphysical significance. He was a Christian Scientist and maintained an idealist philosophy, believing that a more intense spiritual reality lay close at hand but hidden from sight. Scraping and carving were highly significant in his practice because they helped Nicholson to create the suggestion of peeling away the superficial and reaching down for some profound truth. His use of relief was an important development of this theme, enabling him to create a number of clearly defined depths between the upper and lower layers. As he explained in his statement for Unit One in 1934:

"One can express a thought by taking a piece of stone & shaping it, […] or one can take a piece of cardboard & cut out a circle one depth, or 2 circles 2 depths, or 600 circles 6,000 depths, or one can take a board & paint it white & then on top put a tar black & then on that a grey & then a small circle of scarlet—then scrape off some grey leaving black, some black leaving white, some white leaving board, some board leaving whatever is behind & some of that leaving whatever is behind that […]."

Nicholson’s ‘thought’ only became expressive by continuously working the material, and in December 1933 this came to involve layering and unlayering both paint and actual spatial depth. Rather than building up towards a resolved surface, he sought to remove layers and thereby to create an interaction between his additions and the qualities of the support itself (‘whatever is behind’). Whereas his scraped paintings of 1925–33 suggested accumulated overlaid skeins of paint, the discovery of relief enabled Nicholson to create more clearly defined planes. This involved the leap from scraping a surface to cutting through it, puncturing it, and creating a shapely window onto a layer of contrasting colour and texture beneath it. In December 1933 (first completed relief), Nicholson successfully developed the sophisticated illusion of several consecutive overlapping planes, in which underlying planes are revealed by the partial penetration of the upper ones.

This work was first exhibited as ‘Two Circles’ in the Unit 1 exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in April 1934. A version of this exhibition toured to several locations in England the same year, in which Nicholson showed six works. Of these, three—all titled ‘Composition 1933’—were made in 1933. If it was exhibited, it was under a different title from that used in the Unit 1 exhibition and related publication, where it was called ‘Two Circles’.

The pencil inscription on the backboard of this work—’painted relief december 1938/ (first relief)/ by Ben Nicholson’—was probably written by the artist's daughter Kate Nicholson, who inherited this work from her mother Winifred. The backboard and frame follow the style that Nicholson began using in the sixties: the backboard has been washed with a translucent pale grey colour and then lightly textured with wire wool. It is likely that the work was framed in this way for either Art in Britain 1930–1940 at Marlborough Fine Art in 1965 or Nicholson's large-scale retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1969. A heavily worn label from Marlborough Fine Art is affixed to the backboard, and this includes the stock number LOLBN85.


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In the years after it was made, December 1933 (first completed relief) came to hold an important position in accounts of Ben Nicholson’s work. In ‘Notes on Abstract Art’, published in 1941, the artist described the quality of his early abstract work of 1933: ‘At first the circles were freely drawn and the structure loose with accidental textures’. Writing to Charles Harrison in 1966, he gave this account of how he made the first relief carvings:

My first relief came about by accident, when in scoring a piece of board prepared with some kind of plaster preparation which I’d made on it the lines crossed X and this piece [arrow line] came out. I then developed this lower level further and am still doing so… The point is that I was (as in the penicillin discovery) exactly ready for this accident at that moment… The reliefs of Arp had no influence because in fact although I liked their freedom and humour and poetry their method of approach ran contrary to my ideas of working my “idea” into the material – this to me is vital.

In the nineteen-forties and subsequently, as it became necessary to give a narrative of his career, Nicholson used December 1933 (first completed relief) as a landmark in his personal artistic development. He selected it for his large-scale retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1969, and it was illustrated in two monographs that he helped to edit and regarded as definitive accounts of his oeuvre. He also intended to illustrate it in his Penguin Modern Painters monograph of 1948, but it had to be cut presumably owing to the limited number of illustrations permitted. In a letter of 1943, he justified his desire to illustrate this and a related work: ‘I think it [an abstract painting of 1933] is an important one to have in for the same reason that the first relief is—as although it is not the first abstract ptg it is the first one with a real idea in it I think, and it explains the road to the later ptgs.’

Nicholson interpreted his work teleologically: earlier works were directly related to later ones in a cumulative sequence of progressions. December 1933 (first completed relief) was initially titled ‘Two Circles’ when illustrated in 1934, but the artist subsequently retitled it as ‘first completed relief’, first doing so publicly in a monograph published in 1948. Preparing books about his work—those published by Lund Humphries and the Penguin Modern Painters series in 1948—led Nicholson to ponder the stages of his creative development and to crystalise them in a linear sequence. The new title—‘first completed relief’—helped to create a progress narrative of his work, in which December 1933 (first completed relief) was situated at the beginning of a sequence that led inexorably to the white reliefs made between 1934 and 1939, painted reliefs made between 1935 and 1945, and later painted and monochromatic reliefs made from 1955 onwards. The same teleological thinking is apparent in Nicholson’s retrospective title for 1924 (first abstract painting) (Tate).

December 1933 (first completed relief) has been widely discussed in scholarly literature relating to Ben Nicholson. In 1969, the art critic John Russell regarded the year 1933 as a significant development in Nicholson’s career. ‘What we want, if we know how to read it,’ he wrote, ‘is what Ben Nicholson did in 1933.’ Also in 1969, the art historian Charles Harrison suggested that Nicholson’s adoption of relief carving was intimately connected with his exploration of a wholly abstract idiom: ‘The crucial development for Nicholson was not his move into total abstraction late in 1933 so much as his move towards actual carving of the surface; though in retrospect one can see how closely the two were linked—the actual depth of the surface, that is to say, kept the abstract image substantial.’ Harrison went on to describe how December 1933 (first completed relief) ‘has the object quality of one of [Alfred] Wallis’s cardboard shapes and preserves the experience and excitement of its making as a piece of cardboard would preserve for Wallis the magical properties of the sea or of ships painted upon it.’

More recently, writing in 1993, the art critic and historian Norbert Lynton gave the following descriptive account of the early reliefs:

"In the summer of 1933 BN was in touch with a range of abstract art and artists in Paris through Abstraction–Création. That December he was in Paris again, visiting Winifred and the children, and it was there, in a rented studio not far from Winifred’s flat, that he made the first works that appear to have been intended as reliefs. They combine inexactly inscribed disks with rectangular areas and were painted after the carving was done; their colour was not revealed by cutting as when he incised lines in painted gesso. 1933, December (first completed relief) is at once bold and tentative, revealing changes of mind in its surface as well as the basic confrontation of disks and rectangles which becomes the idiom of the white reliefs."

In 1993, Jeremy Lewison sought to integrate Nicholson’s work into contemporary developments of the Parisian avant-garde. He noted several other artists who were making relief at the time—Antoine Pevsner, Marcel Janco, Léon Tutundian—and suggested that ‘[t]he notion of creating a work of art in an area between painting and sculpture was therefore in the air.’ He also noted that the aspect of ‘a primitive game’ in December 1933 (first completed relief) bore an affinity to certain works by Alberto Giacometti made in 1931–32. He further suggested that the act of carving was probably stimulated by Nicholson’s use of linocut printmaking, and that awareness of relief carving was being promoted at this time by his friend Adrian Stokes in his books The Quattro Cento (1932) and The Stones of Rimini (1934). Lewison found it significant that December 1933 (first completed relief) was made in Paris—the city where Winifred Nicholson was living, who was of ‘continuing importance’ to Nicholson, and from where he received ‘the influence of the group of artists that were now his friends’, the milieu around Abstraction-Création.

Reviewing the Tate Gallery’s 1993 retrospective of Nicholson’s work, the art historian Margaret Garlake referred to December 1933 (first completed relief) as a ‘prototype relief’: ‘the two circles resemble a game board or even a memory of the holes of guitar and violin.’ This teleological reading, implying that the first completed relief was merely a ‘prototype’ for the artist’s later more ‘typical’ work, reflects the artist’s own attitude.

In 2002, Peter Khoroche wrote that the first relief arose from ‘the natural outcome of several tendencies combined’. These included Nicholson’s existing practice of scraping and incising paint and gesso grounds; ‘his passion for working with his hands’; his pre-existing idiom of ‘painting […] overlapping planes in shallow space which he developed from Cubism’, from which the reliefs were ‘a logical development’; and, finally, the mutual exchange of ideas with his new partner Barbara Hepworth.

In her PhD, completed in 2015, the Nicholson specialist Rachel Smith described ‘movability and interaction’ as ‘important aspects of Nicholson’s early reliefs’. She emphasised ‘his flexible rotation of (or movement around) boards’, and how in consequence ‘he positioned them as surfaces with flexible orientations’. Referring to ‘modes of address’, Smith suggested that the early carved reliefs have a telling ‘horizontality’ and noted how ‘they compare more easily to drawn architectural plans than to other artworks’. Smith’s arguments represent the most recent contribution to an extensive literature, which itself demonstrates the canonical status of December 1933 (first completed relief) and its enduring importance as a landmark work in Ben Nicholson’s oeuvre.