Page 36 - Studio International - June 1967

A unique venture : the achievement

of Ben Nicholson

Norbert Lynton

Recent works by Ben
Nicholson are on exhibition
at Marlborough Fine Art
until July 1.

The role of Ben Nicholson in British art is clear enough. more or less aplomb and for lesser and longer periods.
Into an artistically provincial Britain he brought fully But Nicholson alone did not need to revert; what he had
fledged modernism, directly influencing sculpture as well found was not something outside but inside: in recogniz-
as painting (the white reliefs of 1934-9 are contributions ing the fundamental issues of the art we call modern he
to both media). It was not, simply, that he had discovered had recognized himself.
and assimilated Cubism and was proving its viability to a We must learn to see his work in its proper, supra-
reluctant public of artists and spectators. Rather, his national environment. I mean not merely that his
personal idiom incorporates both understanding and emergence in the thirties must be set against the lowering
transcendence of Cubism, together with elements of firmament of European art in that decade, during which
artistic modes that had come into being as correctives to Russia and Germany closed themselves to all creative
Cubism, and even aspects of traditional values which adventure and even in Western Europe regressive tenden-
Cubism had seemed to shatter. cies were able to drive avant garde activities into almost
In this sense his venture out of provincialism and into underground positions. It is important that Nicholson's
the international modernism that centred on Paris was work should be seen as a whole, as one manifestation of
unique. Many a twentieth-century artist has undergone modern art as a whole.
conversion at the hands of Paris. The storage racks of Until about 1932 Nicholson's art was that of a sophisti-
modern art museums are heavy with the works of cated primitive. These words should not sound as para-
desperate or falsely confident men who hide their naked- doxical in conjunction as they do. Most of the art that is
ness under borrowed clothes that they do not know how to labelled primitive is distinguished by stylistic and often
button. Other British artists besides Nicholson found the iconographical sophistication. In Nicholson's case the
courage to adopt modernist stances and to hold them with sophistication reflected his family's place in the arts, his