Ben Nicholson

When Ben Nicholson visited Greece for the first time in 1959, he responded to the ruins of Mycenae and made a small number of works which allude to the site, of which November 1959 (Mycenae 3 – brown and blue) is the most developed. Speaking to the art critic John Russell a few years later in 1963, the artist described Mycenae as one of his favourite places. An intense shade of blue recurs in each of Nicholson’s Mycenae works. A master of poetic allusion, he routinely denied any literal interpretation of his art. The circles in his reliefs, for instance, variously suggest the moon, a round tabletop, the ball from his bilboquet, though never any one of these things exclusively. So it is with the airy blue in 1959 (Mycenae) (1959, Bechtler Museum of Modern Art) and November 1959 (Mycenae 3 – brown and blue): it might hint at warm seas, clear skies, early evening shadows, but never one thing specifically. A few years earlier, in 1955, Nicholson had insisted that ‘[b]lue exists in a painting in its own right – no sea, no sky, no ‘key’ is required to experience this blueness.’ Nevertheless, in spite of this protestation and even when he employed the most austere mode of abstraction, the Mycenae works and others like them retained their connection to Nicholson’s memory of a place. Speaking to Russell, Nicholson said, ‘I have favourite places — Mycenae and Pisa, and Siena, for instance — and I feel that in a previous life I must have laid two or three of the stones in Siena Cathedral, or even perhaps one or two of those at Mycenae!’ Throughout his career the idea and experience of Greece resonated deeply for Nicholson and continued to find its way into his work. Although he did not visit Greece until spring 1959, he returned to the region on four occasions in the subsequent years. He often referred in his various writings to the classical ideal, and his aspiration to achieve ‘total form’ in his work was at least in part based on it. * 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.