Ben Nicholson

July 14–54 (viper) was made shortly after Ben Nicholson’s return from the 1954 Venice Biennale, which he had visited as the British representative. The work was almost certainly made in his studio at Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, along with several other still-life pictures completed the same calendar month: July 13–54 (Mediterranean); July 16–54 (still life in shadow); July 25–54 (red to black). All use dense compositions that fill the entire tableau, retaining the rectangular shape of a picture while eliminating other pictorial conventions such as the assumed spatial recession from bottom (foreground) to top (horizon). The cups, jugs and goblets fill the picture plane and activate the paper support as if it were synonymous with the table top on which they stand. In September and October 1954, July 14–54 (viper) was one of forty-eight numbered works included in Nicholson’s solo exhibition at The Lefevre Gallery in London. In the accompanying catalogue, each work was titled by the date of its completion with a subtitle in brackets. Listed chronologically by order of completion date, the earliest work being Nov 5—52 (daddylonglegs), the exhibition reflected a sustained period of fluent productivity in which Nicholson completed an average of one work every fortnight.

Nicholson first developed cubist tendencies in the late twenties and much of his work explored the enhanced concept of picture-making that developed shortly before World War I. July 14–54 (viper) uses the cubist conceit of multiple overlapping perspectives. The rectangle of the table top is pictured squarely, as if from directly above, while the still-life arrangement is viewed frontally. A further conceit, employed frequently by Nicholson, is to treat the still-life vessels (not just those made of glass) as if they were transparent, thereby allowing the silhouette of each object to remain visible and causing those objects behind to be viewed with similar clarity to those at the front. This suggests further layers of perspective—as if the viewer was looking between and around the vessels—even as it brings the entire composition to the surface and thereby emphasises the flatness of the picture plane. In this way, Nicholson was able to create a considerable tension between the spatial illusionism of the image (perspective, depth, layers, etc.) and the literal flatness and material qualities of the work.

This tension was brought about through an intuitive process, the sequential steps of which are more or less visibly discernible from the work itself. By treating every vessel as if it was transparent, Nicholson was free to practise a fluent style of draughtsmanship peculiar to himself. As such, most of his still-life pictures began by drawing from life using real objects that Nicholson kept in his studio and arranged for this specific purpose. Continuous free-flowing pencil lines overlapped and interconnected as he superimposed the images of individual glasses, cups and jugs one upon another. In July 14–54 (viper), a substratum of line drawing interacts with firmer, more decided drawing closer to the surface. Some of this substratum is partially obscured by watercolour, and some of it relates to lines that were later adjusted and redrawn more firmly, resulting in a rhythmic visual echo. In the course of creating a composition with line drawing, Nicholson discovered new shapes and patterns from the confluence of interlocking outlines. He would then emphasise certain areas of negative space—commas, brackets, shadows—by filling them with dense pencil shading or, as in July 14–54 (viper), oil colours of red and blue. The art historian Charles Harrison referred to these ‘solid black forms’ as ‘distant descendants of the soft shadows in earlier still lifes’ by Nicholson.

Nicholson’s subtitles were usually evocative and playful rather than literally descriptive, but they provide a valuable insight into how the artist himself perceived the contents of a work. The eponymous reference to ‘viper’ in July 14–54 (viper) is created in three discrete areas of pencil shading and locally applied pale red watercolour, arranged in cusped and serpentine shapes in the middle of the work. A snake-like motif emerges from the rippling intersections of glass or ceramic vessels, and probably became apparent only in the course of making the picture. One of Nicholson’s favoured object types was a glass goblet with a fluted stem, and one of these appears on the left-hand side in July 14–54 (viper), its snaking outlines contributing to the titular idea. (Other similar objects can be found in various works throughout Nicholson’s career including examples made in 1924 and 1970.) Nicholson was prolifically inventive and his ability to treat the same motif in a variety of different ways is apparent from these curly-stemmed goblets: also in 1954, he made a self-portrait in which the intersection of two wavy lines suggests the meeting and intertwining of two mouths—a pair of profiles meeting, their silhouettes woven together, in a recapitulation of the same motif he used to depict himself and Barbara Hepworth in 1933.

Although Nicholson began to use the primary colours—red, blue, yellow—in paintings from the mid-thirties in response to his discovery of Mondrian, he made a further leap in 1943–45 when he continued to use areas of fulgent, non-naturalistic colour in a burgeoning new phase of his still-life work. The combination of this constructivist approach—the juxtaposition of elementary colours—and the pictorial illusionism of a still-life arrangement was to provide Nicholson with a rich seam of creative possibility, which he exploited until he moved to Switzerland in 1958. Where a work such as May 24–52 (red yellow blue) shows how Nicholson could reduce this combination to its simplest expression, July 14–54 (viper) uses red, blue and yellow with a greater degree of subtlety. The watercolour ground is composed from an underlayer of yellow overlaid with an area of blue, the two colours blending in places much as they did in the artist’s layered, heavily rubbed oil paintings of the same period. At the upper right-hand corner, opaque areas of blue and red oil colour create an accent, which registers clearly against the neighbouring area of layered, translucent watercolour.

This work was first acquired by Dr Riccardo Jucker, who owned it for many years. Dr Jucker was based in Milan and his fortune derived from the family textile business. He became a renowned collector of modernist and contemporary art, including significant works by artists including Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. His interest in Nicholson’s work of the fifties reflects its continuity with the synthetic cubism of Picasso and Braque before World War I. Jucker later collected work by the likes of Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet, Giorgio Morandi and Mark Tobey. Later in life Jucker sold some works, partly with a view to securing a legacy by donating a small group of works to a museum. His collection is now owned by the Museo del Novecento, Milan.