Ben Nicholson

Nov 9—53 (walnut) was completed on Monday 9 November 1953 in Ben Nicholson's Porthmeor studio in St Ives, Cornwall (fig. 1). From 1945 until around 1958, Nicholson’s burgeoning international reputation rested largely on the stature of still-life paintings such as this. When he won first prize at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition in 1952, it was for a still-life painting: Dec 5—49 (poisonous yellow). The art historian Charles Harrison took ‘the best paintings of the years 1945-55’ to be ‘works of the highest quality’. Nov 9—53 (walnut) has many of the qualities that won Nicholson critical and commercial commendation at this time.

Upon completion or shortly afterwards, the painting was given by the artist to his second wife, the acclaimed modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and it has not previously been offered for sale. Nicholson and Hepworth divorced in 1951 but maintained a friendship and a correspondence until her death in 1975. Nov 9—53 (walnut) was made two years after their divorce and was in Hepworth’s possession by September 1954, when it appeared on a list of ‘pictures by Ben Nicholson in possession of Barbara Hepworth’. An inscription in Nicholson’s hand on the reverse reads: ‘belonging to Hepworth’. Several other works from the early fifties were also presented to Hepworth, including Sept. 6—53 (Aztec) and May 54 (Delos). In a letter, Nicholson explained to Hepworth that he wanted to ‘give you a ptg for the children’s 3 in 1 birthday! And if you still like it as much as you said I’d like you to have the ‘Greek’ one, not only as a present but also because I think if you hang on to it it will one day become valuable.’

Nov 9—53 (walnut) evokes an assortment of glass or ceramic vessels clustered on a table top. No single object is outlined in full. Rather only sections of individual objects are delineated, and these intersect to create the ripple of a glancing look. The picture combines multiple perspectives: the table top is viewed from above while the vessels are viewed from the front, for example. The palette is predominated by white and cool earth colours. Finely graded tones of grey and brown contrast with a small number of cleanly delineated panels of saturated colour—blue, verdigris, acid green, dark orange—which are loosely grouped together along a vertical axis. The rectangular surface of the table occupies much of the picture. A narrow strip of dark brown along the left-hand edge of the painting indicates the table top’s thick profile, and the table leg is indicated by a short pencil line at the lower left-hand corner. The right-hand edge of the painting is filled by a narrow tapering rectangle, which grows wider at the bottom. This may refer to the studio’s exposed wooden floorboards. The colours of the rectangle, pale brown above and dark brown below, approximate to the ‘walnut’ colours of the artwork’s title. A broad band of white creates a landscape-like horizon line at the picture’s upper edge; this may have been suggested by the white walls of the artist’s studio as they appeared beyond the edge of the table top.

After an extended period (approximately 1936 to 1944) in which Nicholson’s output was predominated by works of austere rectilinear abstraction, he returned to representing still life with a vengeance. His still-life paintings made in Cornwall between 1944 and 1958 are an original, personally distinctive response to issues raised by Cezanne and cubism—especially the inconsistencies of human binocular vision and the overlap of competing perspectives, and the mediated, material properties of pictorial art. In these pictures he often combined multiple perspectives, and the disparity between them generated suggestive spatial properties: in Nov 9—53 (walnut) vessels are represented as if viewed from the front; the rectangular table top beneath and around them is apparently viewed from above; and in consequence the vessels appear suspended in mid-air. Elongated, tapered areas of shadow follow the silhouettes of some vessels, communicating a sense of weight and modelling; yet these cleanly outlined shadows also rise to the surface of the tableau, forming an abstract pattern by themselves that bears a passing resemblance to the inky black, round-edged shapes that populate Joan Miró’s work of the forties and later, which Nicholson admired.

The vessels in Nov 9—53 (walnut) are variously represented as transparent and opaque, their silhouettes freely intertwining with those of objects that stand behind or in front of them. It is possible that degrees of transparency and opacity were loosely suggested by the materials of the vessels to hand (glass—transparent; ceramic—opaque). The brilliant, gleaming whiteness of a single narrow rectangle in the upper half of the painting may register the surface quality of a ceramic. The vessels that dominate Nov 9—53 (walnut) are goblets: two of them stand on left-hand side of the table, one (mostly white) superimposed over the other and composed from a splintered column of coloured panels. On the right, there are outlines of other goblets or glasses with rippling moulded stems. Several photographs of the artist’s studio at Porthmeor Beach show vessels casually dispersed across Nicholson’s work bench. Nicholson’s friend David Lewis described the studio and how ‘on a shelf were the bottles and glass goblets which appear in so many of his paintings.’

Each outline in Nov 9—53 (walnut) was drawn using firmly applied, sometimes ruler-guided applications of a large graphite pencil. The use of line drawing was an outstanding feature in much of Nicholson’s mature work. His lines are playful and elastic, qualities redolent of Paul Klee’s draughtsmanship, and they behave simultaneously as rich surface patterns and sober description guided by observation.

Pencil drawing was used in concert with localised areas of painting and scraped-down painting. The canvas of Nov 9—53 (walnut) is coarse but finely woven, and its textures are frequently visible at the surface as a consequence of scraping with a razor blade: over a period of several weeks or months Nicholson would apply several fine coatings of paint, rubbing the medium into the pores of the canvas to expose the grain; he left them to dry; then he scraped into the accumulated layers, creating a lively surface by unevenly exposing a variegated cross-section of whatever lay below. The palette is predominated by earthy, tonally related hues of brown, grey and white; the variation of grey is especially subtle and richly monochromatic, being enhanced by the dual use of oil paint and pencil hatching. Four small, cleanly delineated panels of saturated colour—blue, acid green, verdigris, dark orange—are loosely aligned along a vertical axis: they create a visual accent that is underlined further by their smooth, flat, opaque surface, which differs from the roughened surface that characterises other areas of the painting. The same device was used in other paintings finished the same year, including Feb 53 (contrapuntal) and Sept 6—53 (Aztec), in which areas of saturated colour—blue, red, yellow, etc.—were confined to narrow, irregular columns.

The early to mid-fifties was a period of heightened self-confidence in Nicholson’s career. He held several solo exhibitions in New York, London and continental Europe, and in 1954, he exhibited at the British Pavilion in the Venice Biennale along with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. His monographer Norbert Lynton rationalised the effect these exhibitions had on the artist’s work: ‘Exhibitions are planned in advance, especially major ones, and serve as something of a stimulus. Artists feel encouraged by the prospect, and put on their mettle. They know their work is wanted.’ This goes some way to explaining why Nicholson was so productive in the year 1953.

In the early fifties, the rapid sequence of completed work encouraged Nicholson to title his paintings using not only the month and year of completion, but also a specific day. Although he subsequently preferred to omit the day, retaining only the month and year (as in the case of Feb 53 (contrapuntal)), in the early fifties most publications and exhibitions about his work used titles that include the day. Every work in his solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1954 was given a title that included the day, month and year, including Nov 9—53 (walnut). Owing to his preference for protracted periods of working, which helped to enliven the ‘idea’ and enrich the material quality of a work, these dates indicate the moment of completion rather than the period through which a work was made.

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The still-life paintings Nicholson made between 1950 and 1955 were heavily mediated and every element—colour, line, shape, texture—was used to communicate some other sensation or experience. Each work transforms its material components into something else. Taken as a whole, the visual field shimmers with allusions. Nicholson achieved this using a spectrum of representational devices, ranging from literal imitation to simile and metaphor.

The first half of the nineteen-fifties was a high point in Nicholson’s exploration of natural materials through the medium of painting. He later continued to develop this interest with more involved tactile techniques, using canvas less and wooden boards more, and in 1955 resuming his practice of carved relief. In 1968, expressing his attraction to the quality of natural materials, Nicholson asked rhetorically:

'what is more beautiful than the natural ‘inner’ colour of wood and stone? At any rate there must be available the full range of colour from that of stone or wood to the brightest and most pungent colour imaginable.'

To Nicholson, wood and stone were attractive for their visual quality and their origins in the living world as distinct from the domain of art. Richly subtle variations of texture and colour suggested to Nicholson the healthy, vital existence that underlay the living world—‘an undiscovered, unlimited source of life of which mankind has so far discovered only the merest fraction’, as he put it.

Colour/material metaphors were an important aspect of Nicholson’s work in 1950-55. The textures and colours of the painted object came to suggest those of other materials, while the work itself remained a palpably literal construction of paint, pencil drawing and scraped canvas. It was the poetic and associative dimension of Nicholson’s method that led him to treat colour as a metaphor: blue was sea or sky, red was coral, brown was walnut. In a painted relief such as Nov 1—53 (coral), the word for a material—coral—can simultaneously be understood as the pale red hue of the same. This is also true of July 27—53 (ivory) and Nov 9—53 (walnut) among other cases. Nicholson underlined this multivalent quality in titles such as Dec 51 (opal, magenta and black) and July 53 (nut brown), where the word for a natural material—opal, nut—was juxtaposed with colour words—brown, magenta, black. (Nicholson subtitled many other works using colour words alone, as in the case of Feb 26—52 (lime green), Aug 11—53 (meridian), Feb 18—54 (azure) and May 2—54 (blushpink).)

Similarly, vice-versa, materials referred to in subtitles could be metaphors for colour: the idea of a certain material helped to project its intrinsic colour. Aside from works such as Sept 3—53 (diamond), icy in chatoyant hues of white and blue, this thinking was occasionally couched in terms of artists’ materials. Works such as July 55 (Hb silver) and 1955 (still life—red oxide) spoke to the literal make-up of the object—HB pencil, red oxide pigment—and therefore emphasised the slippage between representation and a self-evident, unmediated, material presence. It is telling of his particular genius that the more attention Nicholson drew to the literal components of his art, the more the works themselves enacted a pictorial function and pointed beyond themselves to external referents.

As was often the case with Nicholson’s ‘luggage tag’ subtitles, references to natural materials played on a double meaning. Besides evoking the natural material itself, there was frequently a more superficial meaning—the description of a colour. Such a connection was suggested by his painting’s partial similarity to the named thing. In both his conversation and writing, Nicholson was adept at drawing to the surface the English language’s implicit multivalence: in this instance he made intelligent use of the way words for wood and minerals frequently double as descriptions of colours that match with those materials. (Common examples include ‘silver’ and ‘gold’, which at once describe precious metals and the colours thereof.)

The titular reference to ‘walnut’ in Nov 9—53 (walnut) reflects Nicholson's desire to create sensuous combinations of shape, colour and material texture. The word ‘walnut’ variously suggests a tree species, the timber and edible seeds it produces and the colour thereof. By situating Nov 9—53 (walnut) in this broad field of connotations, Nicholson drew the viewer’s attention to the organic, open-grained textures of the scraped and painted object, which in places have the complexity of sawn wood. The palette is predominated by a narrow range of neutral hues—grey, buff, off white, pale and darker brown—and this further elides the painting with organic matter.

In many other works produced between 1950 and 1955, Nicholson made titular references to minerals and organic matter, especially types of stone and wood. Several works with these titles were exhibited in Nicholson’s 1954 solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery: besides Nov 9—53 (walnut), examples included June 17—53 (pewter), July 30—53 (cork) and Aug 2—54 (garnet). The full range of references from 1953 alone included ‘coral’, ‘crystal’ and ‘blue crystal’, ‘diamond’, ‘ivory’, ‘nut brown’, ‘stone’ and ‘quartz’.

Pursuing his still-life theme in paintings made between 1945 and 1958, Ben Nicholson compounded layer upon layer of workmanship and poetic, associative ideas to create paintings that won immediate international critical recognition. In Nov 9—53 (walnut) and works like it, Nicholson synthesised several distinctive qualities to attain a pitch of intensity seldom achieved at any other stage of his development as an artist: the sparing, localised use of startling bright colour; the superficial rhythmic arrangement of glass and ceramic vessels, realised in line drawing of incisive clarity; the evocation of multiple perspectives to create a shimmering sense of layered space; and persuasive allusions to natural materials, achieved by layering up and scraping into paint to create ‘deep’, richly textured surfaces. In 1969, the art critic John Russell had this to say about these paintings of Nicholson’s:

'They stood for an aerial high spirits [sic], an incorporeal gaiety, which are unique in English art. […] The high-key paintings of 1947—53 seemed very beautiful at the time, but they now have an added poignancy. It is, in fact, more than ten years since Ben Nicholson produced a major painting, if by “painting” we understand a picture painted in oils on canvas.'

This was in fact the final period in which Nicholson concertedly explored the rich possibilities of oil paint on canvas, subsequently restricting his output to paintings on board and then carved reliefs and works on paper. Nov 9—53 (walnut) was made at an inspired, productive time in Nicholson’s career and can be counted as one among several significant contributions to the cubist canon of Cezanne, Braque and Picasso. Referring to other paintings of this kind, Russell called them ‘the noblest examples of late cubist European painting.’