Ben Nicholson and his still life pictures

 

Ben Nicholson had little natural drawing ability, and was pushed toward the study of art largely because his parents could not comprehend that he had not inherited their own talents. Finding himself enrolled at the Slade, he frequently bunked off classes with his friend Paul Nash, also a (self-confessed) draughtsman of ineptitude. Often they would play billiards at the Gower Hotel, where he later attributed the colours and forms of the balls as being an important factor in his road towards abstraction. His sole offering for the Slade’s in-house exhibition was a striped jug, and he left the school the following year.

In 1924, after his first forays into pure abstraction, he returned for a time to the humble jug and mug, which he painted in silhouette, with one or the other form competing for dominance in the space. These were much admired by Jim Ede, then assistant to the Director at the Tate, who as a result obtained several works either gifted by Ben or at a knockdown price.

The chance meeting with Alfred Wallis in 1928 was to have a profound effect on Ben’s approach to landscape, and later that year his painting 1928 (Porthmeor Beach, St Ives) included an architectural feature on the right-hand side (which Checkland construes as a gable end, but is more probably one of the dominant three arches in the pier at St Ives).

The picture is clearly painted over another image giving it additional depth, and is generally regarded as the precursor of these layered landscape/still life works.

Ben’s collection of mugs, jugs and jars was precious to him and travelled with him throughout his various homes during his life. Drawings of these are often simple outlines, often overlapping each other, superimposed onto an abstract background which sometimes have elements of landscape in them. He developed a signature fusion of abstract and realism during the war years, when there was no market for progressive “Modernist” art, and often portrayed views over rooftops and out of upper windows, a device he had previously seen in Cubism, combined with still life groupings in the foreground.

The works showing a more realistic and definite landscape setting he referred to as his “pot boilers”, or “Cornish best-selling schemes”, terms which were designed to indicate how contemptuous he was of the need to be so commercial, and they were produced purely from the need to bring some money in during the early years of his relationship with Barbara Hepworth, who had little time to work herself as she was exhausted from looking after the triplets and in poor health as a result.

Possibly the most prolific output happened in February 1945, when, having secured scholarship funding for the triplets to Dartington Hall in Devon, the pressure was on to raise the necessary balance, and he completed twelve paintings in just ten days, of “fishing boats and flags on mugs and still life generally”. These include the well-known images including Union Jacks, which are often erroneously attributed to a celebration of the end of the war in Europe, although in fact most were painted before VE day.

The series ranges from 1944 with works such as Carnstabba Farm (above), a relatively conventional view, to the late 1950s, e.g. August 1956 (boutique fantasque), in which the background has been reduced to fields of colour only suggestive of the landscape. In between, the landscape sits at varying degrees of tension with the still life elements, a particular example being November 11-47 (Mousehole) (shown below) where the realism of the scenery is at odds with the lopsided panel of still life shapes in the right foreground, and at the other end of the scale the later work 1959 Argolis, painted in Greece, synthesises the tabletop with the sky and sea completely.

 

While Ben himself clearly had a low view of what he achieved in these paintings, moving away from his ideal of total, pure abstraction, there is no doubt that he inadvertently hit on a unique pictorial style, one which has become as recognisable, if not more so, than the White Reliefs with which he first shook the world of 20^th century art.