Ben Nicholson

Design for an Act Drop belongs to a decade-long phase of Ben Nicholson’s career between 1935 and 1945 in which he made abstract paintings and low reliefs, distinguished by a personal combination of rectilinear shapes and intense local colour. Shortly after he began to make rough-hewn relief carvings in December 1933, he progressed rapidly to more refined and rectilinear carvings in low relief, and then to painted reliefs in 1939. All the while, from as early as 1935, he made entirely flat planar paintings, which closely resembled the appearance of his carved reliefs. Design for an Act Drop is an example of Nicholson using in two dimensions the idiom he had developed in three. The rectilinear units of the design interact to suggest complex spatial effects of recession: the panels of mauve at the right- and left-hand edges appear furthest back; the central section, the outer sections coloured faun and pale grey, project from these framing units of mauve; and at the centre, contained within a square, a complex interaction of smaller squares and rectangles—some of them subdivided by ruled pencil lines—ripple with further suggestions of projection and recession.

Nicholson’s use of colour was pivotal in conjuring the illusion of spatial effects in this work. Neighbouring contrasts of dark and light serve to push forward or pull back a certain area of the composition. The special quality of the palette, with only one area of primary colour, the small red square, reflects the maturation of Nicholson’s colour sense during his enforced wartime sojourn in St Ives. From the Cornish countryside he developed an appreciation for complex hues suggestive of sea, sky, coast and heath, ranging from acid yellow and warm magenta to autumnal lilac and rain-washed grey, umber and viridian. Design for an Act Drop is composed of such hues. Except for the rectangle in which the circle resides, white is eschewed in favour of grey and tawny colours. The contrast between mauve and pale grey has connotations of earth and stone.

The title ‘Design for an Act Drop’ suggests this work was intended for a theatrical production, an ‘act drop’ being the curtain lowered between acts, but it is not known which ballet or opera it relates to. It was developed from a square-format painting with a closely similar composition (fig. 1), which Nicholson made two years earlier in 1943. The colours, shapes and arrangement of the middle square are identical in these two works, while the three bands of colour that wrap around the square have been adjusted in the larger version. But the main difference in the larger work is the addition of two strips of darker colour along the left- and right-hand sides, which widen the format and give it the proportions of a stage curtain. The relationship between these two versions is therefore dissimilar to cases such as Two Forms (1940–42), a group of nine abstract paintings in which Nicholson used the same composition except for ‘subtle changes in the colour of one area [that] reassert the uniqueness of each version.’ Nevertheless, a degree of serial continuity is evident in much of Nicholson’s abstract paintings and reliefs between 1940 and 1945.

Nicholson had only brief and intermittent contact with the world of stage productions. In 1934 he was invited by Léonide Massine to suggest designs for a ballet inspired by Beethoven’s seventh symphony. In response, he produced two small-scale white reliefs—one intended as an act drop—and sketches for costume. Massine ultimately rejected Nicholson’s ideas. In a solo exhibition at The Lefevre Gallery in 1947, Nicholson exhibited a painting entitled ‘still life (russian ballet) 1946 (November 26)’ (no. 83). Such works may simply have been stimulated by Nicholson’s enjoyment of ballet, rather than being produced in response to a specific commission. The same might be true of a later work titled ‘1965 (décor for Shakespearean ballet 2)’.

Design for an Act Drop was on loan to the Arts Council Collection for an extended period, and it was exhibited by that organisation in 1955. A related exhibition label is affixed to the backboard. The backboard is also inscribed with the title, artist’s name and an Arts Council Collection reference number (A/C 313). These inscriptions are not in the artist’s handwriting. Nicholson gave this work to his last significant partner, Angela Verren Taunt, whom he met in December 1971 and in whose collection it was at the time of her death in 2023.