raising the flag of modernism

8/20/2019 Raising the Flag of Modernism

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Kevin Darling-Finan TMA02 A485 Y8567719

Raising the Flag of Modernism: Ben

Nicholson’s 1938


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The National Gallery has recently added to its collection a painting that encapsulates one ofthe most complex, dynamic and contested moments in the history of modern British art.Painted by Ben Nicholson, the heroic figure of the abstract movement in England, the

composition of 1938 (fig. 1) is disquietingly simple. Geometric zones of unmodulated hues,red and yellow, blacks, white and greys delineated by lightly ruled pencil lock into a perfect,

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seemingly static, matrix. Two expansive circles to the right relieve the work’s rectangularseverity without disrupting it: a floating white disc at the top, anchored by a crimson circleoffset below.

Despite its ‘landscape’ format, 1938 bears no conceivable relation to natural topography.Indeed there is little in this picture to link it to the landscape genre with which Englishnational identity remained so closely bound in the aftermath of the First World War. Namedsimply for the year of its making, 1938 refuses both the motifs and perspective of naturalism.It denies narrative. It withholds, even, the comfort of a descriptive title to rescue it fromgeneric anonymity. Alien it may seem, yet 1938 is an unmistakeable tour de force, its designequally legible from up close and far away. Even if the viewer knows nothing of its origins,the composition is unusually clear, certain and resolved, and it has an impact that far exceeds

its modest dimensions. It could be said, in fact, to possess many of the iconic qualities of anational flag. One question that in 1938 might well have been asked is, whose national flag?

The making of a renegade

In a carefully posed portrait by Paul Laib from c.1933 (fig. 2), Nicholson presents as anunsmiling figure, wearing black with a beret. Turning athletically to challenge the viewer, hedoes not seem English, but rather, conveys the air of a revolutionary, artist or intellectual ofthe Parisian Left Bank. If, then, it could be said that 1938 seems deliberately provocative inits enigmatic assertiveness, so too does its maker.



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Coming from an artistic background (the son of the successful Edwardian painter William Nicholson) and steeped in an appreciation of the seen object, Nicholson always struggled toresist his father’s seductive example as a supreme still-life painter. Nicholson’s discovery ofChristian Science in 1918 and Cubism soon after, gave him the means to reach an alternativeworld beyond appearances. He quickly outgrew any association he joined, starting with the

Seven and Five Society, an idiosyncratic group of artists mostly inspired by nature. Aware oftheory, yet scornful of dependence on it, throughout the 1930s Nicholson both joined andformed artistic groups intending to convert them to his own intuitively defined version ofabstraction, and to provoke them out of what the critic Herbert Read called the ‘slumbering

provincialism’ of British art.1

A key ally in this was a fellow artist (later to be his second wife), the sculptor BarbaraHepworth, who he met in 1931. Nicholson joined her at the colony of artists and art writersliving in the leafy lanes of Hampstead, North London, a community that included the already

prominent sculptor Henry Moore. The heart of this community was a complex of purpose- built studios at The Mall. Built in 1873 along a lane off Parkhill Road, they were unheated

and barely six metres square, with tiny doors and large east windows facing onto a garden.The Frenchman Jean Hélion described the enclave as an ‘English bateau-lavoir where Benand many other young enthusiasts were working out a new [abstract] art of restraint andsubtlety’.2

The eminent art critic Herbert Read, who joined them in 1933, later called the community a‘nest of gentle artists’,3 a perception confirmed by another neighbour, H. S. (Jim) Ede, thenassistant keeper at the Tate Gallery: ‘All these artists were familiars, constantly coming inand out, and what is more, bringing their work, hot from its making, to show or give’ .4 Theequilibrium changed with Nicholson’s arrival. While still primarily Cubist in 1931, his

paintings by 1933 had suddenly reduced to hand-drawn circles and squares, painted andsometimes carved, reflecting his and Hepworth’s new affiliation with the strict new Parisianabstract group, Abstraction-Création. This quantum leap announced to fellow artists that

Nicholson had no further use for the figurative image, far less for Surrealism, which he feltwas only serving to extend the life of figuration. The choice seemed clear: join Nicholson orelse prove that Surrealism was not obsolete but was, rather, the more completely human (andthus fitter) destiny for modern art. Among the followers Nicholson attracted were the painterJohn Piper, his neighbour Cecil Stephenson and a ‘pupil’, Arthur Jackson (Hepworth’scousin).

Until this time, the self-appointed stabilising figure of the community at Hampstead had been

the older Surrealist artist Paul Nash, a veteran of the First World War and an authoritativewriter, but given to depression and chronic illness. In 1932 Nash sought to cement over thefissures emerging among this gifted cluster of artists and to boost its fortunes with a newgroup, Unit One. Its optimistic aim was to advance the cause of modern art through a unitedexploration of the ‘truly contemporary spirit’ in art.5 Aware of the domineering mission ofBen and ‘Ben’s boys’ (as he called them), Nash excluded Nicholson until the membershipwas established.6 Nash’s concerns were shared by Herbert Read, a staunch supporter of

Nicholson and then-editor of the Burlington Magazine. Like Nash, Read upheld a vision ofdiversity in the arts, based on a British paradigm of liberal democracy. Although theyeventually included Nicholson in Unit One, Read, who would write the foreword for thegroup’s 1934 exhibition catalogue, also entertained the thought of excluding him in the name

of collective harmony.7

‘I tried’, as Read later wrote, ‘to argue, and I still believe, that suchdialectical oppositions are good for the progress of art’.8

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By 1936 the need for Nicholson to project a formidable image of himself and the movementhe represented had in fact become strategically vital. A level of tactical shrewdness had also

become necessary in his dealings with ostensible allies such as John Piper. A former followerand now occasional critic of Nicholson, in May 1936 Piper had taken issue with Nicholsonabout his tendency to ‘force’ artistic movements. ‘You can’t encourage history while it’s

going on’, Piper told him, ‘you can only recognize it when it becomes history’.24

But Piper’sobservation was somewhat disingenuous as he, like Clark, was simultaneously engaged insteering Surrealism and not Constructivism into the history books.

The International Surrealist Exhibition took place in London that summer, organised byHerbert Read and others. It attracted huge attention, in no small part due to stunts, whichincluded Salvador Dalí lecturing in a diving suit. It upstaged completely a significanttravelling exhibition of international abstract art, Abstract and Concrete, mounted in the

preceding months by Nicholson’s friend Nicolete Gray.25 Nicholson may have viewed thesideshow into which Surrealism had degenerated as a chance to garner respect for abstractionas a dignified alternative for modern art. Public credibility was particularly important at this

juncture as he and Read were seriously contemplating establishing a Museum of Living Artdevoted to non-figurative art.26 Paul Laib’s portrait of Nicholson, dated c.1933, suggests that

Nicholson was already cultivating many of the qualities that might be expected of a leader ofthe new abstract art movement: courage, control, simplicity, seriousness and a reservedsophistication.27

Marshalling a theoretical alternative of gravitas and breadth to the Surrealist exhibition wasslower. In 1936 Nicholson, the architect J. L. Martin and the Russian sculptor Naum Gaboconceived an International Constructivist manifesto, which aimed to define and givecoherence to the spectrum of Constructivism as it was being practised across disciplines andnationalities. Entitled Circle: An International Survey of Constructivist Art , it represented inkey respects a dialectical opposite to André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1925, in whichSurrealism had been defined as ‘dictated by the thought, in the absence of any controlexercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’.28 Circle was published inJuly 1937 to coincide with an eponymous exhibition, and its typographically severe coverdesign featured a list of sixty-eight ‘signatories’: painters, sculptors, architects and writers.29 Inside, essays and illustrations by contributors demonstrated the expressive powers of line,colour and shape, independent of any association with the seen world. Whereas the architects,designers and town planners showed how Constructivism’s universal and rational principlescould be applied for utopian ends, Gabo spoke for Nicholson and himself in maintaining thatcreative art, while similarly controlled, was free of such utilitarian obligations.

Against a background of rising fascism and communism in Europe, critics viewed this suddensolidarity among Constructivists with alarm. Commentators from Left and Right attackedtheir purist, ‘ivory tower’ agenda, Bolshevik -style manifesto and ‘rigid’, ‘inhuman’ and‘conformist’ rules, and likened their art to an aesthetic equivalent of the Nuremberg andMoscow rallies.30 In particular, leftists, shaken by Stalin’s purging of his own intellectuals inthe 1936 – 38 Moscow Trials, viewed the exclusionary zeal of the Constructivists withapprehension. Buckling under the strain of supporting both Surrealists and Constructivistsamid this volatile political climate, Herbert Read retreated from the North London scene.‘Guns’, he said, ‘were being fired at him from every side’ .31 Undeterred, Nicholson continuedworking on his white abstract reliefs while editing Circle. Then, in mid 1937, with Circle

completed, Nicholson embarked upon a series of paintings in which the unmodulated primarycolours of De Stijl and the architectural severity of the Bauhaus influence merge. It is out of

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this chaotic and distracting context of artistic and global contestations that the poised andmagnificently static painting, 1938, emerged.

Mondrian

As the situation in Paris deteriorated, Nicholson’s first wife, Winifred, evacuated her childrento England and, in late September 1938, with the urging of Nicholson and Hepworth,

persuaded Piet Mondrian to accompany her to safety. Nicholson found Mondrianaccommodation and studio space on the first floor of 60 Parkhill Road, Hampstead, where heretained a studio in the garden (fig. 3). For the next eleven months the two artists workedintensively in their austere adjacent studios. Hepworth later recalled how in that period ‘PietMondrian became a pillar of strength’ to Nicholson and herself .32

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The impact of Mondrian’s London visit upon Nicholson’s work at this time has often beendiscussed. The actual process of the change it effected upon Nicholson’s work has not. Newscientific analysis of 1938 suggests that the painting may have been partially, if not fully,undertaken during Mondrian’s time in Hampstead. What is most immediately apparent is

Nicholson’s decision to introduce a strong element of pure yellow. This was a colour thatWinifred, as Nicholson was fully aware, considered to be Mondrian’s own discovery.33 While

its use does not in itself prove that Nicholson painted 1938 after September of that year,infrared reflectography now reveals that this yellow was initially used to form vertical and

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horizontal bars of different widths to divide the canvas both horizontally and vertically, withthe horizontal yellow line joining the yellow vertical to the left and co-terminating with theright edge of the lower white rectangle. The result was a grid-like structure, unusual in

Nicholson’s oeuvre (fig. 4).34

It seems possible that this structural innovation may correspond to a tentative breakthrough inMondrian’s own work that took place in the London studio in late 1938 in which Mondrianrevisited an isolated work from 1933 entitled Lozenge composition with four yellow lines.Around October it appears that Mondrian resurrected his earlier idea of employing yellowlines of varying thickness. From late 1938 onwards Mondrian began to incorporate them into

his grid paintings to the eventual exclusion of the dark lines for which he was formerlyknown. This experimental shift, which is widely believed to have taken place afterMondrian’s transferral to New York, is recorded in drawings and a painting started inLondon. The latter, New York City, 3, is now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection,Madrid.35

Another compositional element in Nicholson’s painting that may have been affected was hisuse of the circle, a key feature in his oeuvre that above all maintained his independence fromMondrian. Nicholson’s identity had became so inseparable from this motif that he had, earlierin the year, placed a small red disc beside his signature in the poster he designed for the ShellOil Company.36 Nicholson’s ideas about how different circles functioned in his painting werealso well developed, even before 1941, when he described how, when two squares are placedin proximity to a pencilled circle, ‘you can create a most exciting tension between these

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forces and, if at any time, this tension becomes too exciting, you can easily, by the smallestmark made by a compass in its centre, transfix the circle like any butterfly!’37

The same infrared photograph (fig. 4) now shows that a third circle exists beneath the palegrey paint layer in the upper left of the canvas. At its centre is a small compass hole (digitally

highlighted in red). This in itself might not be particularly surprising, given Nicholson’stendency not to make preliminary drawings. However, in this instance Nicholson’s decisionto alter the position of his circles may have been a result of Mondrian’s advice, which theyounger artist had formed a habit of soliciting. Mondrian, who was described in 1941 as‘probably the only painter in the world who hasn’t drawn a curved line in 20 years’,38 nevertheless took an interest in how Nicholson used circles. He wrote in 1940, ‘I do like your

photo of relief only I should like the big round a little otherwise placed: it goes to the left’.39

The evident increased influence of Mondrian’s work upon Nicholson cannot simply beascribed to Nicholson’s knowledge of his friend’s theoretical writings, despite the fact that

Nicholson had recently edited Mondrian’s essay on Neo-Plasticism in Circle. It seems instead

more likely to have come about through his close proximity to the older figure, which untilnow had been limited by the geographical distance between them. By late 1938 Nicholsonhad also come to own a painting by Mondrian, which he greatly prized.40 There seems noneed to doubt Nicholson when he states: ‘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’.41

In March 1939 in the months following the publication of Circle, Reid & Lefevre heldanother one-man show of Nicholson’s work, rivalling that of the all-white reliefs exhibitionthey had staged four years earlier. It unveiled the results of the most rigorous phase yet in

Nicholson’s career. In it were displayed forty-one works: nineteen chromatic paintings,sixteen white reliefs, two gouaches and four drawings. Although not previously noted in the

painting’s exhibition history, 1938 was included in this exhibition, probably no. 8 in thecatalogue.42 It is fascinating to see in an archival photograph of the show (fig. 5) how

Nicholson’s paintings and white reliefs (which were almost equal in number) were hungalternately, as though to stress the fact that the white reliefs had not been an icy, monolithicend in themselves at the expense of colour – a criticism often voiced by the art press.

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The overwhelming impression of grand unity created in the Lefevre Gallery showroom is

assisted through the elegantly uniform presentation of the works in simple timber frames,without cluttering labels. Nicholson exercised great control over the presentation of his reliefsand paintings, and it has often been assumed, because of his comments on the subject, that healways made his own frames.43 In the 1930s, however, Nicholson was having his paintingsand reliefs framed by a Mr Arthur Colley in Haverstock Hill, who worked to his instructions.His neighbours, the artist Cecil Stephenson and his wife, Sybil, also occasionally made hisframes. Cecil, who was a trained engineer, had a well-equipped workshop in which he couldmachine mouldings to Nicholson’s specifications, while Sybil possibly finished them and fitted the works.44

Reid & Lefevre’s undertaking to stage an exhibition of such uncompromisingly abstract art

shows a degree of boldness that no publicly funded gallery could have risked in 1939. Todisplay so many works, named only for the year in which they were made, and to presentthem without labels, was to court criticism from uninitiated viewers. The ‘public’ towardswhom the exhibition was directed was the London cognoscenti, a significant portion of whomcomprised progressive architects and architectural critics associated with the MARS group,Unit One and Circle.45 It was this fraternity who consistently purchased, commissioned andwrote about Nicholson’s most ‘difficult’ Constructivist works from 1935 onward, and foundways to incorporate them into their interiors.46 One of these patrons was John Summerson,who had married Hepworth’s sister, Elizabeth, in 1938. Summerson also became the firstowner of 1938.47 In a key review of the 1939 exhibition, Summerson extolled the sensualappeal of Nicholson’s new coloured works:

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Some of Nicholson’s new paintings seem to me irresistible. Their apparent simplicity lays bare the complexity which results from placing together areas of different proportion,different texture, different colour – a complexity which the painter controls and makeseloquent in an extraordinary way.48

For Nicholson’s admirers, the Reid & Lefevre exhibition was his most groundbreaking showyet, for it proved that he was literally bursting out of his monochromatic ‘ivory tower’ toembrace the emotional dimensions of colour. Their optimism, and perhaps relief, wasexpressed by Herbert Read who announced, ‘Now that form has been freed from itsrepresentational functions, [for example, in the white reliefs] colour too is released forexperimentation’.49 The palpable excitement generated by the Reid & Lefevre show was

possibly heightened by news just circulating that the American heiress Peggy Guggenheimhad declared her intention to open a London museum of modern art. This museum, whichwas to be devoted to all modernisms, was to be headed by Herbert Read, a proposal that bothClark and Nicholson greeted with delight.50

War

The Reid & Lefevre exhibition was to be Nicholson’s last major showing before the outbreakof war. In May Nicholson and Cecil Stephenson dug a bomb shelter in the garden at TheMall,51 and in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a treaty of non-aggression,

Nicholson and Hepworth took their family to Cornwall. Elizabeth Summerson packed uptheir studios. Living in St Ives on the generosity of their friends Adrian and Margaret Stokes,the Nicholsons needed to re-establish a source of income far from the art market in London.With England under threat, that market had changed; the public had started buying Englishlandscapes and little else. In March 1940 Nicholson’s dealer McNeill Reid informed him thathe had no hope of getting another abstract show and suggested some semi-representationalworks would do better instead:

I don’t think from our point of view that pure abstract painting is any use; we never sell muchof it, and no matter how great our interest one of our problems today is to keep ourselvesalive and to find what might sell, without reducing our artistic standards any more than wecan help.52

Faced with no alternative, Nicholson evolved a commercially successful hybrid genre ofabstract painting that incorporated landscape elements and delicate secondary tones such as

pink and green. Although he called these lyrical works his ‘potboilers’, they clearly convey

the artist’s appreciation of his new Cornish surroundings. For this factor alone many criticswere mollified, as the new St Ives paintings clearly manifested, in common with thelandscapes of artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, a sense of genius locus,much vaunted by figures such as Clark in this period of crisis, and which paintings such as1938 so conspicuously lacked.

Despite what looks like an embracing of Neo-Romanticism, Nicholson continued to makeConstructivist works, even if he could not easily exhibit them. Kenneth Clark’s use of hisofficial role in the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to further kill off geometric abstract artwas yet another obstacle. In 1935 Clark had implied that abstraction was ‘essentiallyGerman’ for its over -reliance on theory.53 Now, in 1939, Clark held that abstract art involved

a wilful denial of painful actualities, causing ‘our indignation … to overflow and swamp ourdetached contemplation of shapes and colours. To be a pure painter seems almost immoral’.54

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From the very first list of artists that Clark drew up in September 1939 to undertake paidartistic projects in the national interest until his last, drawn up in February 1940, Clark leftout Nicholson. That it was his intention to destroy abstract art seems patently clear from aremark he made to Herbert Read in November 1939. With Nicholson safely four hundred andfifty kilometres away in the south, Clark observed that abstract art and so-called functional

architecture were dead ‘and a damned good job too’.55

For those like Clark who chose Surrealism over abstraction when opting for a stream ofmodern art, this destruction of the Constructivist cause was one of the most positiveoutcomes of the war. ‘The Death of Abstract Art’, crowed Geoffrey Grigson in the Listener in 1940. Grigson then went on, condescendingly, to pronounce:

War is emphatic; it may not innovate, but it emphasises inclinations which were concealed byfashion or familiarity … war was only the climax of a total state of affairs which was helpingto scotch the drift towards abstract art. Still, abstraction is not something to be burieddishonourably and then forgotten. It was one of the ways taken, up to a point, by the livelier

artists of the last 30 or 40 years.56

Encouraged by Read, Mondrian and Summerson, Nicholson ignored provocations of thiskind. Although Nicholson’s dogged attempts to re-insert Constructivist paintings back intohis dealer’s stock were met with reproach in March 1944,57 by this time his abstract work wasfinally starting to be shown in the public gallery sector .58 In September 1944 Philip Hendy,director of the Leeds City Art Gallery, mounted the first non-commercial retrospective of

Nicholson’s work at Temple Newsam, a stately home on the city’s outskirts to which Hendyhad relocated the Leeds art collection for the duration of the war .59 An exhibition of this kindwas impossible at the Tate, which remained closed during the war until 1946. But even had it

been open, its director, John Rothenstein, felt nothing for abstract art. As he stated: ‘I fail, beyond a certain point, to respond to the uncommunicative forms and relationships whichconstitute at the same time the language and message of abstract art’.60 Rothenstein’sassistant keeper, Robin Ironside, who had succeeded Ede in 1936 and was himself aSurrealistic and Neo-Romantic painter, was actively hostile to Nicholson’s abstraction, whichto him represented a ‘continental reliance upon theory over the British preference forempiricism and was thus unwelcomely foreign and barren’.61

Herbert Read opened the Temple Newsam exhibition and Summerson travelled up to Leeds,reporting back to Nicholson who was too unwell to attend.62 The Times covered the event: inmeasured but positive terms, its writer called Nicholson ‘the doyen of abstract art in

England’, and observed how well the show illustrated the logical unfolding of Nicholson’scareer, from still-life painter to abstract painter by 1933, and finally to Constructivist: ‘Fromthen [1933] it is a very short time before he has reduced painting to its barest essentials: torectangles of primary colours flatly painted on large areas of grey and white’.63

The Leeds retrospective marked a turning of the tide for Nicholson in so far as it heralded amore rational era in which abstract art could once again be addressed. It also brought togetherthree people who were to become a powerful triumvirate in championing Nicholson’s art inthe postwar era. Herbert Read and John Summerson were both to produce monographs on

Nicholson in 1948. In the meantime, Hendy’s influence on the art world was increasing, as ayear later (in 1945) he was appointed director of the National Gallery, replacing Sir Kenneth

Clark at the pinnacle of the art establishment.

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Polemic 1946

In the more liberal culture of the immediate postwar era, 1938 suddenly become a poster-child for a fresh British outlook. The painting shot to fame in a new philosophical journal ofthe highest profile. Polemic, edited by Humphrey Slater (a former artist and communist who

had distinguished himself in the Home Guard), was created to ‘commission essays by writerswho are opposed to the drift back to Romance’. It showcased the new thinking of the mostfamous British philosophers of the day, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer.

Nicholson was invited to design the covers of its first two issues. The maiden issue sold outin just two days, ‘such was the hunger for serious reading matter at the end of the war’ .64

In the second issue of Polemic Slater dedicated a three-page article to Nicholson arguing thatabstract art could elicit emotion and was therefore capable of heightening human experience.One of the works he reproduced in colour to illustrate his case was 1938. Slater’s decision tochampion Nicholson ‘in an anguished world at a moment of trembling peace’, and at a time‘when abstract painting is now not in vogue’,65 reflects the concerted push on the part of its

editor and his eminent authors to put British intellectual and aesthetic debate back onto ananalytic and speculative footing after a period of seven years in which a sentimentalnationalism had dominated British cultural life. Slater’s desire to revive and stimulate widerunderstanding and acceptance of Nicholson’s abstraction was part of a plan to draw the artist,after an era of conservatism, into a high-profile, united front for literary and visualexperimenters.

This was the first time that Nicholson’s Constructive paintings were reproduced in colour, anevent all the more notable in light of the ongoing restrictions on wartime printing. It fulfilleda supreme wish on the part of the artist, who had become convinced that the public’s inabilityto appreciate his abstract paintings was due to a lack of good colour reproductions.66 Theimpact of 1938 was immediate. In the fourth issue, another piece appeared on Nicholson in

Polemic, this time by Stefan Themerson, an avant-garde Russian-Polish refugee andfilmmaker turned philosopher with links to the Constructivist Moholy-Nagy. In his articleThemerson echoed Slater’s endorsement of Nicholson, but went further to demonstrate that

Nicholson’s pictures, which Themerson called ‘still-lifes’, referred to objects, squares andcircles, as realistically as other still-life painters depicted fish. To illustrate his point,Themerson used a caricature of Nicholson’s 1938 (fig. 6). Its visual quotation of the work is

powerful proof that 1938 had acquired recognition within this distinguished philosophicalcontext, following from its reproduction in colour in the same series two issues earlier.

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In representing the qualities of a particular shape, Themerson argued, Nicholson, importantly,was not dabbling in universals but in particular realities. This was a claim that Nicholsonhimself might not have made about his work previously, although it was an idea that he wasgradually coming around to.67 It was an ingenious point to make at this particular moment

because, with the Second World War just over and another seeming imminent with the build-

up to Cold War, the credibility of universal concepts had come under question following theirabuse in the hands of ideologues. To praise a notion of ‘whiteness’ in Nicholson’s work was,in Themerson’s view, tantamount to validating other generalities, such as ‘the State’,‘Fatherland’, ‘God’, ‘Race’ and ‘discipline’, in the name of which conflicts continued to be

justified.68

Themerson’s article and whimsical diagram (possibly the work of his illustrator wife,Franciszka,) deliberately adopted the plain, expository mode of his mentor Bertrand Russellto put Nicholson’s art squarely back into the realm of British empiricism. It also evoked thesimple pictograms that champions of modern art had begun to use to make links between oldmasters and contemporary art, and to clearly explain the developmental stages between them.

This ‘new rationalisation of modern art’, as Virginia Button has called it, had beeninaugurated by the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr’s now -famous flow diagram of 1936 in which he showed the evolution of abstract art (fig. 7).69

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While Nicholson had been appreciated since the early 1930s by intellectual figures abroad, Polemic was crucial to him for regaining respectability as a prominent voice within thevanguard of liberal British thinkers. Polemic also lifted the heavy stigma of adjectives such as‘alien’, ‘doctrinaire’, ‘unfeeling’ and ‘crypto-fascist’ from Nicholson’s abstract works, andrepositioned these same works within a new discourse of ‘cool, liberal rationalism,

sympathetic to science, hostile to the intellectual manifestations of romanticism, and



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markedly anti-Communist’ that Polemic represented.70 Nicholson’s painting was chosen asthe visual analogue of the positions promoted by figures such as Orwell, Russell and Ayer.

Nicholson himself thought hard about the concessions he would need to make to assume thenew role of ambassador of liberalism now open to him, and he sought ways to align his

artistic ideas with the new order. Already in 1941 he had speculated that ‘liberation of formand colour is closely linked with all other liberations one hears about’, and that thereforeabstract art ‘ought, perhaps, to come into one of our lists of war -aims’.71 In the aftermath ofthe war and the escalating hostility between the USSR and its former Western allies,

Nicholson came to the view that recent world events had rendered extreme positions in art, aswell as politics, repugnant.72 He also claimed to welcome the co-existence of modernRomantic art, and to find a positive value in the contrasts between different artisticapproaches,73 a pluralist position remarkably close to the one espoused by Read and Nash in1933. The greatest concession of all, however, was Nicholson’s decision to disavow the termConstructivist, to free himself of its associations with his old friend Naum Gabo and theRussian movement.74

The two monographs by Summerson and Read on Nicholson that appeared in 1948 also didmuch to reinvent the artist as a liberal humanist. Read’s book featured 1938 among thehandful of works illustrated in colour .75 Quickly then, in the aftermath of the war, 1938 was

becoming linked in the public mind with the new values being ascribed to Nicholson’s work,and was shedding its former associations with aggressive and doctrinaire foreign art. In his

preface to the popular and accessibly priced Penguin Modern Painters volume, JohnSummerson dismissed the notion that Nicholson was influenced by Constructivism, statingthat he had only ever been influenced by individuals, not ‘trends’.76 Herbert Read’s larger,more expensively produced two-volume work was designed to cement Nicholson’simportance in the international art field. It was, as one artist later put it, the monograph ‘thatwent into the museum library [throughout] the world’.77 In his introduction Read emphasised

Nicholson’s individualism, writing that ‘no painter could be less ideological, in the sense ofusing his craft to illustrate a thesis’ and that ‘Ben Nicholson has never accepted such anextreme position’ as Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism.78

The remaking of Nicholson as an ‘apolitical’, liberal artist has particular implications for theMelbourne painting. In 1950 the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked Nicholson tocomment on a closely related version, also entitled 1938.79 Possibly sensing a trap, given theclimate of Cold War paranoia, in his reply Nicholson avoided all mention of theConstructivist, internationalist milieu in which he had painted the 1938 works.80 Instead he

cautiously compared the painting to an 1895 poster entitled Girl reading by the BeggarstaffBrothers (his father William Nicholson and uncle James Pryde), thereby furnishing the workwith a conceptual provenance that was purely British, and a Victorian (pre-RussianRevolutionary) one at that.81

In 1948 Hendy and Read were appointed to the Fine Arts Advisory Committee (FAAC), a branch of the British Council, on a board now weighted in favour of contemporary art. In thethree years since the end of the war, the British Council had adapted from being an overt

propagandistic body into an ‘unacknowledged arm of foreign affairs supported through avelvet glove of high culture’.82 The FAAC’s role was to use art to build bridges with formerenemies and to promote Britain as an exemplary model of democracy and diverse cultural

excellence. The decision to appoint Hendy and Read ensured that between 1947 and 1960 Nicholson was selected for forty international exhibitions, including São Paulo in 1941 and

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Australia in 1949. Then, in 1954, he was selected along with Lucian Freud and Francis Baconfor the British Pavilion in that year’s Venice Biennale.

1938 was included among the fifty-three works by Nicholson at this internationalexhibition.83 Despite postwar paper restrictions, the British Council managed to publish a

separate catalogue of its trio of artists at the pavilion. Nicholson received top billing on thecover and his section led the catalogue with an introduction by Herbert Read. The paintingthen travelled with the Nicholson section as part of a stand-alone monographic exhibition tothe premier art venues of the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Switzerland.84 The Councilalso arranged for a black and white illustration of 1938 to be included in the Stedelijkcatalogue. For the Paris leg, the most prestigious of the tour, the catalogue was translated and

produced in colour. In 1955, when the show returned to British soil, it was mounted onceagain in an amended form at the Tate Gallery. This invitation, made at the instigation of thedirector, John Rothenstein, who had been on the same panel as Hendy and Read, was asurprise to Nicholson, who thought it very ‘broad-minded of the Trustees bec. my work issurely not at all up the street of those I know’.85

Although Nicholson’s work still inspired the same kinds of criticisms in Britain that had beenheard in the 1930s, the Tate Gallery, swayed by his success abroad, now finally acquired anexample of Nicholson’s Constructivist painting. This was part of an even-handed attempt byRothenstein to fill some of the glaring gaps in the collection of English modernism after theTreasury awarded the Tate acquisition funds for the first time.86 By 1955 1938 and its twoclosest cognate works were out of reach, but the Tate was able to purchase directly from

Nicholson a large horizontal painting made up of squares and rectangles, June 1937 , whichhad been shown at the 1939 exhibition but which the artist had always retained (fig. 8).87 In1953 Nicholson wrote to Phillip James of the Arts Council that June 1937 ‘is a particularlycomplete ptg – it is in fact one of the ‘major’ works of that period, & certainly one of my fewso called major works’.88

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It seems worthy of note that, from 1948, Nicholson had repeatedly sought to pair June 1937 with 1938 or one of its related versions in catalogues and monographs. They were also hungtogether in this combination at the Venice Biennale, in the subsequent post-Biennale tourvenues and in the Tate retrospective of 1955.

American success

In Paris in October 1956 a $10,000 international painting award granted to Nicholson at theGuggenheim Prize exhibition was decisive in sealing his success with American artaudiences.89 Charles and Kay Gimpel of Gimpel Fils, who had been his London dealers sinceDecember 1954, had worked hard to promote Nicholson’s work in the United States.Described in 1957 as ‘the most authoritative purveyors of the art of the avant-garde’,90 Charles’s brother and partner, Peter Gimpel, has recalled how the gallery in the mid 1950sdid as much as ninety per cent of their business with Americans.91 It was also unique at thistime for its practice of keeping stock of its artists, in some cases by strategically buyingearlier work from collectors. Peter Gimpel has further observed that the efforts of Read and

the British Council in promoting Nicholson made a great difference to its ability to sell hiswork. ‘Every big prize … was important … it helped enormously’. 92 Nicholson’s work hadreached a peak of market desirability when John Summerson decided in 1956 or early 1957to place 1938 with the Gimpels.

On 1 February 1957 the Gimpels sold the painting to the American philanthropist andcollector of twentieth-century art Richard S. Zeisler, who was already an established admirerof Nicholson’s work .93 Only twenty-six days later, 1938 appeared on the walls of theContemporary Arts Museum of Houston in a landmark US exhibition of InternationalConstructivism, The Sphere of Mondrian. The exhibition was the brainchild of the museum’snewly appointed curator, Jermayne MacAgy. Such a swift sequence of events suggests thatMacAgy and Zeisler may have planned to acquire 1938 specifically for her exhibition, and itseems possible that the Gimpels even approached Summerson to part with the painting ontheir behalf. Zeisler, who died in 2007, kept 1938 for almost fifty years before bequeathing itto the National Gallery of Art, Washington, to provide funds for the acquisition of furtherworks of art. The painting was placed back on the market in 2007, following which theMelbourne benefactors Loti and Victor Smorgon generously acquired it for the NationalGallery of Victoria. In so doing, they fulfilled a long-held ambition of the NGV to own anoutstanding example of Nicholson’s Constructivist period.

As this article has shown, 1938 is much more significant in the development of Nicholson’s

Constructivism than has so far been recognised in the extensive literature on this phase of theartist’s work. The picture’s unique historical value is based on a combination of three factors:first, its subtle registration of Mondrian’s influence upon Nicholson’s practice in 1938;second, its presence at the 1939 Reid & Lefevre Gallery exhibition, which was the mostunified body of Constructivist works that Nicholson ever showed; and finally, its utilisation

by the philosophical journal Polemic to radically re-orient public perceptions of geometricabstraction at a crucial moment after the Second World War.

This discussion began by asking ‘whose flag’ was the abstract painting 1938. It was adeliberately rhetorical question, given that Constructivism, which the painting represents,refutes all reference to the external world and hence to a literal object such as a flag. Yet, at

the same time, flags themselves do not represent a literal world but use pure form and colourto denote ideas of identity, place and ideology. In this sense their function is not so far

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removed from one of the capacities of Constructivist art. I have argued that it was anxietiesabout precisely these types of issues that complicated the reception of Nicholson’s abstractart during the politically unstable years around the Second World War. However, as has also

been shown, the abstract qualities of Ben Nicholson’s 1938 are – like those of a flag – sogeneral as to render it endlessly polyvalent, subject to continual shifts of meaning and

renewal, dependent upon the historical conditions in which it was, is and may in the future beviewed.

.

1 Herbert Read, Art in Britain 1930 – 40 Centred around Axis, Circle, Unit One,Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1965, p. 5.

2 Jean Hélion, quoted in Maurice de Sausmarez, Ben Nicholson: A Studio InternationalSpecial , Studio International, London, p. 13.

3 Read, ‘A nest of gentle artists’, Apollo, vol. 77, no. 7, Sept. 1962, pp. 565 – 9.

4 Harold Stanley (Jim) Ede, A Way of Life, University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge,1984, p. 57.

5 For a recent treatment of this group’s activities, see Ted Gott, Laurie Benson & SophieMatthiesson, Modern Britain 1900 – 1960, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, pp.197 – 206.

6 ‘I feel we represent the most stable & least biased members of the rather difficultcollection of people who are likely to constitute a group … I heard from Ben & I shall writeto him more guardedly until Barbara is decided upon! … Ben is a good fellow but I do notregard his judgement as entirely sound – & I believe you agree on this’. Paul Nash to HenryMoore, 17 Jan. 1933, quoted in James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read ,Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1990, p. 130.

7 ‘His confusion would confuse the public, and Ben being so vital and energetic, wouldinevitably lead to the creation of a new group, to division & back biting when unity is sonecessary and desirable’. Read to Paul Nash, 23 Nov. 1934, quoted in Jeremy Lewison, Ben

Nicholson, Tate Gallery Publications, 1993, p. 48.

8 Read, ‘A nest of gentle artists’, p. 53.

9 Read, for example, accurately predicted that the lack of a critical vocabulary would marthe reception of Nicholson’s white reliefs (see Jeremy Lewison, Ben Nicholson: The Years of

Experiment 1919 – 39, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 1983, p. 33).

10 John and Myfanwy Piper also began to do so from 1936 onwards (see Joanna Gardner-Huggett, ‘Myfanwy Evans: “Axis” and a voice for the British avant-garde’, Woman’s Art

Journal , vol. 21, no. 2, Autumn 2000 – Winter 2001, pp. 22 – 6, esp. p. 24). See also BrianFoss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939 – 1945, Yale University Press,

New Haven, 2007, p. 186. For Moore’s concerns about ‘the purely constructivist abstract

people’ gaining too much ground, see King, p.165.


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11 They comprised the architects Wells Coates and Colin Lucas, painters John Armstrong,Edward Burra, John Bigge, Tristram Hillier, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and EdwardWadsworth, and sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

12 Read, ‘Unit One’, Architect Review, 6 Oct. 1933, reprinted in Unit One: Spirit of the

30s, Mayor Gallery, London, 1984, p. 49.

13 ‘Have had a most lovely painting day. My last ptgs are completely white’ (Ben Nicholson to Winifred Nicholson, 2 Feb. 1934, quoted in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p.44). The first reliefs slightly pre-date this trip, as Nicholson showed examples at the Sevenand Five Society’s exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in Mar. 1934, prompting DavidGascoyne to describe Nicholson as ‘performing the death rites of painting’ (David Gascoyne,Art, New English Weekly, vol. 5, no. 3, 3 May 1934).

14 Nicholson, quoted in Sarah Checkland, Ben Nicholson: The Vicious Circles of his Lifeand Art , John Murray, London, 2000, p. 119.

15 In a letter to Conrad Aiken, 31 Jan. 1935, Paul Nash wrote that Nicholson was planningan international exhibition for the next 7 & 5 exhibition: ‘all the most important foreignabstract artists will be represented by their latest work. This should be rather a swell showand very stimulating to the young idea in London’ (quoted in Charles Harrison, English Artand Modernism 1900 – 1939, Allen Lane, London, 1981, p. 273, n. 28).

16 Nicholson to Jim Ede, Dec. 1934, quoted in Checkland , pp. 149, n. 36.

17 King, p. 153.

18 Quoted in Checkland , p. 148.

19 See Read, ‘Ben Nicholson and the future of abstract painting’, The Listener , 9 Oct.1935, pp. 604 – 5.

20 Kenneth Clark, ‘The future of painting’, The Listener , 2 Oct. 1935, pp. 554 – 5.

21 Virginia Button, Ben Nicholson, Tate Publishing, London, 2007, p. 38.

22 John Summerson, ‘The MARS group and the thirties’, in John Bold & Edward Chaney

(eds), English Architecture Public and Private: Essays for Kerry Downes, Hambledon Press,London, 1993, p. 305. The full name was the Modern Architecture Research Group. Formedin the same year (1933) as Unit One, MARS was the English arm of the avant-garde CongrèsInternationaux d’Architecture Moderne.

23 Nicholson was cautiously admiring of the fact that Moore and Picasso had both joinedthe party (see Margaret Gardiner, Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir , Salamander Press,Edinburgh, 1982, pp. 50 – 1).

24 Checkland , p. 168.

25 Abstract and Concrete ran between February and June 1936 in Oxford, Liverpool,Cambridge and, finally, London (Lefevre Gallery) and included works by Hepworth,


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Nicholson, Moore, John Piper and many leading European artists such as Moholy-Nagy,Miró, Mondrian, Gabo, Calder, and Giacometti.

26 Conversations had begun in 1935 between Nicholson, Nicolete Gray, J. L. Martin andHerbert Read (see King, p. 178).

27 On the derisive comments occasioned in 1934 by Nicholson’s and Hepworth’s wearingof berets, see Checkland , p. 133.

28 André Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism [1924], in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900 – 1990, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 438.

29 See John Leslie Martin, Nicholson & Naum Gabo (eds), Circle: International Survey ofConstructive Art , Faber & Faber, London, 1937. Over a thousand copies were sold in Britainand the United States in the first year. On the production of Circle, see Norbert Lynton, Ben

Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, pp. 121 – 2.

30 Checkland , p. 167.

31 Read, quoted in Checkland , p. 169.

32 Barbara Hepworth, ‘Mondrian in London’, Studio International , vol. 172, no. 884, Dec.1966, p. 288.

33 Nicholson held Winifred’s views on colour in the highest regard. Winifred pointed outto Mondrian that ‘“You are the first person who has ever painted Yellow … pure lemonyellow like the sun”. He denied it, but next time I saw him, he took up the remark. “I havethought about it” he said, “and it is so, but it is merely because Cadmium yellow pigment has

been invented”’ (Winifred Nicholson, ‘Mondrian in London’, Studio International , vol. 172,no. 884, Dec. 1966, p. 286).

34 During the 1930s Nicholson is known to have used the commercial primer Coverine asa quick-drying substitute for gesso and the French white house paint Ripolin as a top coat onwhite reliefs. In 1938 the ground layer has been freely applied in sweeping circular strokes,the wide brush marks visible in the areas around the two circles.

35 Mondrian continued to work on New York City, New York 3 after he relocated to New

York in 1940. These transitional works later become the foundation of his last major paintings before his death, the famous New York series of 1941 – 42. Joosten states that NewYork City, New York 3 is ‘possibly one of the two greater pictures mentioned in Mondrian’sletter of 10 December 1938 to Harry Holtzman’ (Joop M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue

Raisonné, vol. II, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1998, p. 398).

36 1938 (You can be sure of Shell), poster for Shell Mex and BP Ltd, V&A Museum,reproduced in Lynton,

p. 168.

37 See Nicholson, ‘Notes on abstract art’ [Oct. 1941], Horizon, London; revised version in

Read, ‘Introduction’, Ben Nicholson, Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings, Lund Humphries,London, 1948.


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38 Geoffrey T. Hellman, The Talk of the Town, ‘Lines and rectangles’, The New Yorker , 1Mar. 1941, p. 7.

39 Piet Mondrian to Nicholson, 13 Sept. 1940, quoted in Sophie Bowness, ‘Mondrian inLondon: Letters to Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth’, The Burlington Magazine, vol.

132, no. 1052, Nov. 1990, pp. 782 – 8.

40 Mondrian initially placed Composition en rouge, bleu et blanc: II , 1937 (now in Muséed’Art Moderne, Paris), on consignment with Nicholson and later gave it to him (see SophieBowness, p. 785, n. 6).

41 Nicholson, quoted in Sausmarez , p. 7.

42 Sir Alan Bowness has deduced that the painting is most likely no. 8 in the catalogue,‘from the evidence of the prices in relation to dimensions – 70 guineas according to Lefevre’sarchive’ (email correspondence with the writer, 15 Sept. 2008).

43 ‘I have considered the frame which surrounds a work of mine as a vital part of its presentation. Therefore, I have always seen to the framing of my work myself … Framesshould be made of natural wood with little graining and of a colour which is not too hot, nortoo yellow, and which is not stained or varnished. The corners of the frame should not bemitred diagonally. The four sides should abutt [ sic] each other, aligned so that the top sideextends over the left side vertical and that the right-side vertical rises so as to extend over theside of the top lateral. Similarly, the left-side vertical is to extend across the end of the bottomlateral while the bottom lateral is to extend across the end of the right-side vertical.’ Ben

Nicholson to Tate Gallery, 28 June 1979, quoted in Stephen Hackney, Rica Jones & JoyceTownsend (eds), Paint and Purpose: A Study of Technique in British Art , Tate GalleryPublishing, London, 1999, p. 162.

44 In a diary entry of October 1932, Cecil Stephenson wrote that he was ‘making largetrack for pictures for Ben Nicholson’ (see Checkland , p. 107, n. 49). In February 1939 Sybilleft Stephenson for E. L. T. Mesens, publisher of Nicholson’s catalogue for the Reid &Lefevre Gallery exhibition, Mar. 1939. On Sybil Stephenson, see Lewison, Ben Nicholson,1993, p. 52, n. 33; Checkland , p.178.

45 The organisers’ intention to target an elite audience is reflected by their decision to publish the catalogue in the London Bulletin, the short-lived modern art journal edited by the

Belgian Surrealist dealer, E. L. T. Mesens (see n. 45).

46 Nicholson’s long and fruitful association with the architect J. L. Martin has beenrecently explored by Alice Strang, ‘Circle of friends: Ben Nicholson and Leslie Martin’(unpublished paper), Ben Nicholson conference, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 18 – 19May 2007.

47 The painting possibly cost 70 guineas (see n. 43). It is not yet known whetherSummerson purchased the painting or whether it was a gift or even an ‘in kind’ payment forthe Listener review.

48 John Summerson, ‘Abstract painters’, The Listener , 16 Mar. 1939, pp. 574.


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49 Read, ‘The development of Ben Nicholson’, London Bulletin, no. 11, Mar. 1939, p. 9.See also T. McGreevy, London Round-up, London Studio, vol. CXVII, no. 553, Apr. 1939, p.224.

50 See Nicholson to Read, c.Apr. 1939, in King, p. 326, n. 26 & pp.178 – 85. The collection

was to be made up of loans and donations; however, Guggenheim abandoned the scheme atan early stage.

51 See Checkland , p. 179.

52 McNeill Reid to Nicholson, 18 Mar. 1940, quoted in Button, ‘The war years’, inLewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 97, n. 21.

53 Clark, ‘The future of painting’, p. 544.

54 Clark (ed.), ‘Preface’, Roger Fry: Last Lectures, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1939, p. vi.

55 Clark, quoted in Checkland , p. 189.

56 Geoffrey Grigson, ‘The death of abstract art’, The Listener , 12 Sept. 1940, p. 373.

57 See Duncan MacDonald to Nicholson, 28 Mar. 1944, in Button, ‘The war years’,in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, pp. 58 – 9.

58 Six works by Nicholson were included in the exhibition New Movements in Art.

Contemporary Work in England: An Exhibition of Recent Painting and Sculpture at theLondon Museum, Mar. – May 1942.

59 Philip Hendy, ‘Introduction’, Paintings by Ben Nicholson, Temple Newsam, Leeds,1944.

60 John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, vol. II, ‘Lewis to Moore’, Macdonald,London, 1956, p. 261.

61 Robin Ironside, Painting since 1939, Longmans, Green, London, 1947, quoted in Foss, pp. 187 – 8.

62 The extent of detail in Summerson’s report suggests that he himself may have been present at the installation of the exhibition (see Button, ‘The war years’, in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 57, n. 14).

63 ‘Paintings by Ben Nicholson: Exhibition at Temple Newsam, Leeds’, The Times, 14Sept. 1944, p. 6.

64 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Oxford University Press, Oxford,2006, p. 396.

65 Humphrey Slater, ‘A note on the importance of Ben Nicholson’, Polemic, no. 2, 1946, pp. 49 – 51.


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66 Nicholson attributed the critical reviews of his 1944 Temple Newsam retrospective tothe unavailability of colour reproductions of his Constructivist works (see Button, ‘The waryears’, in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 67).

67 ibid., p. 62, n. 34.

68 Stefan Themerson, ‘Circles and cats’, Polemic, no. 4, July – Aug. 1946, p. 36.

69 Button, ‘Spreading the word’, in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 68. According toButton, Nicholson particularly admired Barr’s diagram.

70 Collini, p. 396.

71 Nicholson, ‘Notes on abstract art’, p. 272.

72 See Button, ‘The war years’, in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 62.

73 Nicholson to E. H. Ramsden, 1944, quoted in Button, ibid.

74 Nicholson to George L. K. Morris, 19 Mar. 1949, quoted in Button, ibid., n. 36.

75 Read, Ben Nicholson: Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1948,cat. 75. According to Norbert Lynton, Read had to place pressure on Clark before he wouldagree in 1943 to a Penguin monograph on Nicholson. Problems with paper supplies andcolour blocks further delayed its production (see Lynton, p. 221, n. 13).

76 Summerson, 1948, p. 12. This series cost 2/6d or the equivalent of 12 pence.

77 Patrick Heron, conversation with Jeremy Lewison, 8 Mar. 1993, quoted in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 71, n. 23.

78 Read, Ben Nicholson, pp. 17, 20.

79 At least two closely related works from this year, also entitled 1938, were in privatecollections in the 1940s: 1938 (Painting – version I), later owned by Mrs Neville Burston,and 1938 (Painting – version II) owned by Alexander Calder.

80 Museum of Modern Art, Department of Painting and Sculpture: Ben Nicholson, Painted Relief , 1939, Collection file [artist’s questionnaire].

81 Curiously, Nicholson’s explanation of the Burston painting has been accepted withoutscepticism. See, for example, Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p. 222, cat. no. 71.

82 Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale UniversityPress / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, New Haven, 1998, p. 17.

83 Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud , XXVII Biennale, Venice, BritishCouncil, 1954, cat. no. 11. Nicholson received the ‘Ulisse’ acquisition prize.


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84 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris), Palais desBeaux-Arts (Brussels) and Kunsthaus (Zürich).

85 Nicholson to Patrick Heron, 22 Jan. 1954, quoted in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, p.76, n. 29.

86 See Garlake, p. 14.

87 June 1937 (painting) had remained unsold after the 1939 Reid & Lefevre exhibition. Itwas stored in The Mall studio until the Blitz, when it was relocated to a garage in Cornwall.The Tate also acquired a 1935 relief in this year, assisted by the Contemporary Art Society.

88 Nicholson to Philip James, after 20 Nov. 1953, p. 52, quoted in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, 1993, cat. no. 69, p. 221.

89 It was awarded for August 1956 (Val d’Orcia). See ‘$10,000 for Ben Nicholson’,

Manchester Guardian, 30 Nov. 1956.

90 Basil Taylor, ‘In the bazaar’, Spectator , 16 Aug. 1957, p. 231.

91 See Lewison, Ben Nicholson, p. 83.

92 Peter Gimpel, conversation with Jeremy Lewison, 23 Mar. 1993, quoted in Lewison, Ben Nicholson, p. 83.

93 Other wor ks by Nicholson in Zeisler’s collection included 1933 (Coin and musical

instruments) and Untitled , 1950, later gifted to the Columbia Museum

raising the flag of modernism

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