Ben Nicholson is the painter who, more than anyone else, brought progressive English artists during the early 1930s into direct dialogue with their counterparts in Europe, working at the forefront of the European abstraction movement. The son of a distinguished Edwardian painter of portrait and still lifes, Nicholson inherited his father’s love of beautiful objects arranged on tabletops, but the discovery of Cubism and Christian Science, which he encountered in 1918, enabled him to break from the materialism of his father’s tonal realist depictions and to explore the spiritual and universal essence of these same objects through the symbolic language of geometric abstraction.1For a recent examination of Nicholson’s religious belief in the illusory nature of the material world, see Lucy Kent ‘Immortal mind: Christian Science and Ben Nicholson’s work of the 1930s’, Burlington Magazine, Jul. 2015, pp. 474–81. From this point on he restricted himself to using only circles, squares and rectangles and simplified his palette, briefly eliminating colour altogether. 1938, a painting made two decades later, marks the apogee of his shift from the figurative.2For a more detailed account of the evolution and reception of Nicholson’s 1938, see Sophie Matthiesson, ‘Raising the flag of modernism: Ben Nicholson’s 1938’, in Judith Ryan (ed.), Art Bulletin of Victoria, vol. 48, 2008, pp. 6–21. A strangely weightless arrangement of circles tethered within a matrix of overlapping rectangles, the composition offers at most an idea or distant memory of objects distributed on a surface.
Single-minded and ambitious, after completing his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, Nicholson became a forceful presence in the most advanced artist groups in London: the Seven and Five Society, which he steered away from its organically-grounded Surrealism, and the more outward-looking Unit One, which included both abstract and surrealist strands.3The Seven and Five Society was founded in 1919. Nicholson joined it in 1924, became its chair in 1926 and expelled the non-modernist artists. In 1935 he renamed it the Seven and Five Abstract Group. Unit One was founded in 1933 by the artist, Paul Nash, and lasted two years. Its only exhibition was accompanied by a book by Herbert Read, Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, London, Cassell, 1934. Meanwhile Nicholson, along with his partner, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, was forging links of his own in Paris. In 1933 he joined Abstraction-Création, an international and utopian group of artists committed to the cause of ‘non-objective’ art over figurative Surrealism.4Abstraction-Création was established in 1931 and held its last exhibition in 1936. On the formation of this group, and its Australian members, see A.D.S. Donaldson & Ann Stephen, J. W. Power: Abstraction-Creation Paris 1934, Power Publications in association with the University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney, 2012.
Among the figures Nicholson met through Abstraction-Création was the Dutch De Stijl artist, Piet Mondrian. A dedicated theosophist, who shared Nicholson’s quest for a transcendental art, Mondrian had for some years been creating abstract paintings based on a theory he called ‘Neo-Plasticism’, comprising a dynamic equilibrium of planes of colour and non-colour, and vertical and horizontal lines. The geometric purity of Mondrian’s paintings may have inspired Nicholson to start using a compass and ruler at this time. Nicholson’s experience of visiting Mondrian’s white-washed studio at 26 rue du Départ was also revelatory for its ‘lovely feeling’, and bolstered Nicholson’s faith in his own white, hand-carved abstract reliefs, in which Mondrian took a keen interest.5In May 1935 Mondrian requested from Nicholson ‘a photo of a relief to pin on his wall’ and an enlargement of one of Nicholson’s reliefs. See Sophie Bowness ‘Mondrian and London’, in Christopher Green et al., Mondrian: Nicholson in Parallel, The Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2012, p. 44. Nicholson’s reliefs were received with skepticism and open hostility when exhibited in London in September 1935. See Kenneth Clark, ‘The future of painting, The Listener, 2 Oct. 1935, pp. 554–5.
This dialogue continued in Britain from September 1938, after Mondrian, with Nicholson’s help, sought safety in London from the brewing war. Mondrian took a studio next to Nicholson’s and for the next eleven months the pioneers of English abstraction, Nicholson and Hepworth, lived and worked in close proximity to the older, formal Dutchman. Of this period Hepworth described Mondrian as ‘a pillar of strength’ to them both, and Nicholson stated: ‘I could not be bothered to read Mondrian’s theories. What I got from him – and it was a great deal – I got direct from his paintings’.6Lee Beard, ‘Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian: art, the studio and the modern interior’, in Green, p. 65. Nicholson had handled Mondrian’s paintings as his unofficial London agent in the months leading up to Mondrian’s arrival and by 1939 owned an example, Composition in Red, Blue and White II, 1937, oil on canvas, 75 x 60.5 cm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris which he greatly prized.
In this congenial milieu Mondrian began to introduce yellow lines of varying thickness into his paintings, a process that would culminate in his electrifying New York canvases.7Yellow was regarded by Nicholson’s cohorts as his own discovery. See Winifred Nicholson, ‘Mondrian in London’, Studio International, vol. 172, no. 884, Dec. 1966, p. 286. In London Mondrian resumed a 1933 canvas, Lozenge composition with yellow lines, commenced in 1933, and began what would become New York City 3, described as ‘possibly one of the two greater pictures mentioned in Mondrian’s letter of 10 December 1938 to Harry Holtzman’. See Joop M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998, p. 398. Around this same moment, Nicholson also explored the potential of perpendicular thick and thin yellow bars, as seen in 1938. Infra-red reflectography reveals a more prominent yellow grid underneath the present composition, anticipating the iconic yellow lattices of Mondrian’s later New York canvases.8For published infra-red images exposing the under-drawing, compass marks and an overpainted circle to the upper left, see Matthiesson. But Nicholson did not pursue the exercise. Nor did care for Mondrian’s predominantly yellow New York works.9In regard to Mondrain’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1943, Nicholson thought that the USA ‘did something pretty curious to his work’ and thought it needed ‘another 3 or 4 years to become convincing’. See Bowness, p. 45. In its final form, Nicholson regarded the NGV’s painting as one of his ‘major’ works from his Constructivist period and it was repeatedly published and exhibited internationally.101938 was exhibited at Reid & Lefevre, London, 1939; Temple Newsam, Leeds, 1944; Venice Biennale, 1954 (touring throughout Europe); Tate, London, 1955 and Houston, Texas, 1957. It was illustrated in Polemic, no. 2, 1936; Polemic, no. 4, 1946; and Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson: Paintings Reliefs, Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1948.
Nicholson was first to concede that Mondrian ‘opened up endless possibilities’ for his own art.11Letter from Ben Nicholson to Charles Harrison 29–30 December 1968, Tate Gallery archive, 871.1.3.30. Yet he always asserted the ‘astonishing’ differences in their work and insisted upon the importance of his father’s example upon his abstract paintings.12ibid. For the subtle distancing of Nicholson work from Constructivism and his repositioning as an artist grounded in English traditions during the Cold War, see Matthiesson, pp. 17–21. On the broader question of the English Constructivists’ debt to their continental colleagues, Nicholson told one art critic in 1956: ‘Surely the movement in England was not derivative but inspired by Paris & all it stood for’.13Ben Nicholson to G. L. K. Morris, 25 August 1956 (Morris Archive, Archives of American Art), cited in Bowness, p. 45.
Sophie Matthiesson, former Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
