REVIEWS
Just as Nicholson never really left behind his earliest line work, perhaps he also never fully cleared his earliest joy of representation and landscape. The course of Ben Nicholson’s work makes perfect sense. Begun under the influence of his landscape-painting parents and further enriched by his travels and interactions with artists of various visions, Nicholson expanded his own style, influenced by what was going on around him. Perhaps he adapted the attitude of Brancusi, who claimed to pursue hidden realities and the essence found in objects. 1937 seems to eject all unnecessary detail and present a clean image.
But did subliminal inspiration send him back to his earliest training to set the foundation for this minimal, Neo-Plastic painting that purged itself of objects and set a path for a new art?
With lines as smooth as cleaned bones and corners as sharp as a bird’s beak, the painting presents as analytical geometry. Cubism lays a picnic blanket of logic and basic form over the picture plane. Limited and simple colours form a pleasant puzzle of shapes. Pure white, a rascal red and a raven black quietly delight upon a field of greys.
A closer look might show the illusion of depth as the geometry glides into foreground and background, a landscape slipping in under the austerity of horizontal and vertical. Music seems to move though black shadows, white clouds pass grey doves; a picnic laid in a field of lily and poppy. Perhaps nature is not an unnecessary detail after all.
M.L.
(English translation below Italian)
Rettangoli, quadrati, bianchi, neri, di colori primari. Una partitura musicale, una gabbia, niente linee curve, ma l’astrazione pura, il mondo della natura visto in termini geometrici/matematici.
Il titolo è solo una data (forse è stato dipinto dopo la visita del pittore allo studio parigino di Mondrian , nel 1934) ma quanta poesia e quanta luce in questo quadro!
Tra le forme lineari che si incastrano le une nelle altre, il nero assoluto mi richiama alla mente il quadrato nero di Malevic, il “punto zero della pittura”, da cui può iniziare l’arte contemporanea.
Staccarsi dall’aspetto naturale delle cose è stato il contributo decisivo del cubismo ; l’obiettivo finale dell’arte neoplastica, di cui Nicholson è stato un esponente di rilievo, è la continuazione e il superamento del cubismo e dell’arte pura, astratta.
In basso, i due rettangoli si espandono oltre i limiti del supporto , sembrano voler uscire dalla tela. Come non pensare al pittore italiano Lucio Fontana, e ai suoi rivoluzionari tagli nella tela? Fontana voleva “bucare” lo spazio, andare al di là del visibile. E forse è proprio questo lo scopo di Nicholson: superare le forme naturali per far immaginare ciò che non si vede.
White, black, primary coloured rectangles, squares. A musical score, a cage, no curved lines, but pure abstraction, the world of nature seen in geometric/mathematical terms.
The title is only a date (perhaps it was painted after the painter's visit to Mondrian's studio in Paris in 1934), but so much poetry and so much light in this painting!
Among the linear forms that fit together, the absolute black reminds me of Malevich’s Black Square, the "zero point of painting", from which contemporary art can be said to have begun. Detaching oneself from the natural aspect of things was the decisive contribution of Cubism; the ultimate goal of neoplastic art, of which Nicholson was a prominent exponent, is the continuation and overcoming of cubism and pure, abstract art.
At the bottom, the two rectangles expand beyond the limits of the support, they seem to want to come out of the canvas. How can we not think of the Italian painter Lucio Fontana, and his revolutionary cuts in the canvas? Fontana wanted to 'pierce' the space, to go beyond the visible. Yet this is precisely the purpose of Nicholson: to overcome natural forms to make us imagine what is not seen.
L.M.
This painting is recognisable as a Ben Nicholson in its abstract austerity.
One rectilinear shape overlaps another so that there are at least twelve apparent shallow layers. Some of the shapes are very slightly off-kilter and placed to wittily draw attention to this - a disruption of the delicate precision that keeps most of the rectangles carefully aligned in geometric straightness.
The colours are a mixture of pale good taste with some more intense hues in different quantities.
I imagine Ben carefully adjusting the shapes within the rectangle to keep a balance but offer a subtle brace of perverse aberrations to keep us interested. If you are what you paint, I unaccountably imagine his thin body positioning itself artfully perched on some beige thirties’ furniture, Ben poised to make incisive points and get noticed by some very important person.
M.F.
The National Gallery of Scotland owns this work and writes that many of Nicholson’s paintings of this period derive from still-life motifs on table-tops. We read that Nicholson started to paint rectilinear arrangements in primary colours and mostly tones of blue, grey and white, after his first visit to Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1934 where he was impressed by the feeling of light. I ask myself if I could live with this work on my wall, if it ages well, and the answer’s yes, though I would not have looked at this painting twice unless it was brought to my attention.
I’m disturbed by that dominant black in the centre; find it irritating, though that may be the artist’s intention because that black holds the other colours in place. Similar works titled 1937 all have that black as an element, including the lithograph to the right.
The minimalism is fitting to the 1930s, but these images would not stand out today. On the other hand, they are good works of visual art and this points out a clash between social values (what’s trendy) and visual art’s values (which are dictated by biology). Art was born in the dawn of hominid evolution as a mnemonic tool. Visual art consists of a graphic arrangement, an ordering of reality that we make part of our environment so that it affects us by the order encoded within, by the visual language and what it says.
M.L.
There are two features which I find quite remarkable in this painting. The first is the taut, severe angularity of the colour blocks. And the second is the harsh contrast of these geometrics of colour set against a bland, mundane background.
But overriding these impressions is the black rectangle at the heart of the picture. It looks to be close to the centre, or 'dead centre', as black symbolises death and mourning: black is not a colour but an absolute of negativity, without colour, so just a void. The pastel shades of blue, yellow and red mitigate this focus by drawing the eye jerkily to the right, as they appear like arrows or the extended wings of angular birds, leading up and out of the picture and saving us from the nothingness at its heart.
Is this what Nicholson wanted us to think? Did he see the black as something we move away from and out of, following the colour? Or did he see the black core of the painting as exactly that, and try as we might to avoid it, we are constantly drawn back to nothingness, as we ourselves, with time, will become. Yet the wide monochrome surround looks as if it has legs at the bottom, like a table or easel, as if this is a work in progress: perhaps he wanted us still to have time to decide on whether to fly, or whether to be subsumed by the void.
D.d'A.
Maxine Flaneuse de Cornouaille
It is tempting when faced with such an abstract statement as Ben Nicholson’s 1937 to look into the artist’s past to see what was happening to him at that time or to take a leaf out of history and wonder if intimations of war are visible here.
But having noted the oblongs and squares and the colours, beige, magnolia, white with a hint of blue, speedwell, buttercup, sandalwood, ink, black, I also notice that the darker sections seem textured, the lighter ones smoothly painted. The only anomaly I can find is that the painting begins to lean towards the section on the right of the picture where, unlike the section on the left the lines are no longer completely vertical.
I look at the painting from the front but I get a sense of side. I am definitely seeing things hidden, so that I am not, quite literally given the whole picture as though a pile of canvases stacked against a wall show only teasing sections of what each painting might contain.
And then I wonder if I am looking down from above at some kind of deconstructed floor plan, a staircase, a building that has, like a concertina collapsed downwards.
But I am trying too hard to find something I can relate to. I can and have at times felt an intense connection to the severity of abstraction in a painting or sculpture but here, too many lines and a lack of energy leaves me feeling bleak and empty.
M.Fd'C.
It's been suggested by cancers of critics (like murders of crows) that the worst insult to spit at artworks is 'derivative.' In confronting Nicholson's 1937 (titled the year of execution), I must ask, after Malevich's Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), why denigrate originality with simulacra? 1937 is imitation without innovation, unnecessarily muddying the waters of excitement and energy that was (intermittently) Modernism. The colours are banal and uninspired, the tones so soft as to be irrelevant and easily ignored, more wallpaper than worthy.
But I revere Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black abstracts, decades after Nicholson. And I often 'spit' at ahistorical 'critics' knee-jerking their shallow immediacy as elucidation.
So, consider 1937 – the year defining the painting, perhaps. WWII looms, Stalin's 'Great Purge' begins, the Hindenburg detonates, the rape of Nanking commences, and Franco is 'inspiring' Picasso to paint Guernica this very same year. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuted that year, so never mind those Soviet show trials.
Yet 1937 has some affinity to Chamberlain's hopeful/hopeless assertion of 'peace in our time' (1938), and despite what Thomas Hirschhorn declares, personal enthusiasm is not a panacea to the reality of others, or even ourselves. Nicholson seems to try, here, but falls short, conceptually and formally, from his Constructivist gospel: but I'm a brutal orphan in the 'deconstructed postmodernist dystopia' where subjectivity is an inescapable blessing and curse.
1937 was also the year SPAM was first marketed. Nicholson's 1937 would make a nice label for that. Maybe it did.
B.G.
Normally I give titles of paintings only a cursory glance – if they are not simple labels, then they tend to be superfluously descriptive (‘Woman in Bath’, ‘Boy with Goat’) or defiantly gnomic (‘Stone Glove 4’, ‘Mauve Rabbit Library’). With this picture though, the historical date of the title hovers over it like a dark filter - at least for a European observer.
The upright black rectangle, positioned just off centre, compels and repels the eye immediately. Unnerved, you dart away into the square of pale wintry light to the left, then across flat borders of beiges and creams - the gently tea-stained shades of pre-War offices and railway waiting rooms - seeking out the sky blues and lilacs, the stripe of yellow and the blood-red sunset on the right of the painting. But all this is useless, it’s impossible to focus on these hopeful flags; the black door pulls at your peripheral vision until you have to face it again: a denial, a refusal to talk, a hole in the light. Negative, but not passive – it owns all the energy and force in the picture, shoving clear and neutral colours back to the margins.
1937 invokes the queasy sensation experienced after looking too long at a light source - the sun or an electric lightbulb – leaving an absence at the centre of your vision.
The landscape of Europe by 1937 had of course become extremely dark, from all viewpoints, and it is difficult to avoid the impression that the artist, whether consciously or not, was reflecting this here. So if Nicholson had called the picture ‘Harmony in Beige’ or similar, would it have provoked the same response? My instinct is to say yes, though the darkness at its heart would not be so precisely located.
J.G.
Looking at works by Ben Nicholson from the thirties and in particular, 1937, led me to imagine a man in his forties getting up in the morning with some effort, and after his morning coffee and English breakfast facing still another day where he would paint more of his rectangles and occasional circles overlapping each other. Is that what cut it for him, becoming his raison d'être for that period? Which square or rectangle does the viewer focus on first, those in the foreground or the ones in the background? The smaller ones or the black imposing rectangle in the centre begging for attention? The Courtauld Institute of Art writes about his “sense of depth achieved by the visual weight of the coloured planes”, but what appears to me is a flat work of plainly coloured geometric figures.
Through the psychology of cubism we could try to analyse why he was painting boxes and view it as a form of order to his chaotic world and that of the world around him that was falling into total disarray, rectangles representing doom and isolation, as though he was fenced in. His work of that period seems more the rebellion of an unfulfilled mathematician or builder. Being the son and grandson of artists, Nicholson knew the art business very well; he knew what he was doing, and in my opinion, it was all calculated. He once said, “Satire is fascinating stuff...” Was he pulling us all along, taking us for a ride?
P.W.
