Sale
16627 - Under a Western Sky - The Art of Newlyn and St Ives, 19 Nov 2008
New Bond Street
Lot No: 74*
(n/a) Ben Nicholson O.M. (British, 1894-1982)
Off Brown Vertical Jan 1956
signed, inscribed and dated '(Off Brown Vertical)/Jan 56/Ben Nicholson' (verso)
pencil, wash, crayon and collage
57.5 x 38cm (22 5/8 x 15in).
Sold for £30,000 inclusive of Buyer's Premium
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Email: Matthew Bradbury
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7468 8295
Footnote:
Provenance:
with Rose Fried Gallery, New York, where purchased by the present owner
Cubism opened up an intellectual and imaginative gateway for Ben Nicholson for whom the search for a real and truly independent vision in Art had become an absolute obsession. The son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, Nicholson’s artistic heritage was second to none. For an emerging artist at the beginning of the century, Nicholson had it all – ‘talent, name, encouragement, opportunity’, but above all, ‘the absolute need to rediscover painting for himself’ (John Summerson, Ben Nicholson, Penguin, 1948, p.7 ).
Along with his second wife, Barbara Hepworth, Nicholson, met and knew many of the leading artists of the period, including Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brancusi, Calder, Giacometti and Miró. Nicholson and Hepworth travelled extensively across France, Italy and beyond visiting the artists in their studios on many occasions. The influence of these travels cannot be underestimated. In 1933 Nicholson first met the Dutch artist Mondrian, who became a close friend. Mondrian’s studio was itself a revelation to Nicholson who recalled later in a letter ‘The paintings were entirely new to me […] – the thing I remembered most was the feeling of light in his room and the pauses and silences during and after he’d been talking.’ In the same period, Nicholson saw a Miró which he described as ‘the first free painting’ he had seen (John Summerson, Op.Cit., p. 12).
Off Brown Vertical Jan 1956 demonstrates Nicholsons’ assimilation and development of Cubist ideas discovered on the Continent. In this work, Nicholson seems to have fused the ideas of Picasso, Miró and Mondrian to create a composition that demonstrates his absolute ease with abstraction. The present work is essentially a meditation on still life – a genre that would have had much resonance to Nicholson whose father and first wife, Winifred, respectively, painted the subject with much success throughout their lives. However Off Brown Vertical Jan 1956 is a radical modernisation of the theme. Here Nicholson is concerned with the formal elements of art and the internal dynamics of painting more than the subject itself. The work is physically layered with different media – wash, pencil, crayon and collage – media deployed to enhance the sense of overlapping planes. Elements of still life are faintly discernible: the contours of two goblets oscillate around the brown vertical strip that holds the whole composition together. The visual effect of Off Brown Vertical Jan 1956is essentially a finely tuned and expertly controlled visual chord.
Nicholson stated: ‘The kind of painting I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is both musical and architectural, where the architectural construction is used to express a “musical” relationship between form, tone, colour and whether this visual, “musical” relationship is more or less abstract is for me beside the point’ (quoted in Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, p. 138).
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