BEN NICHOLSON
Two Jugs, L47, 1967
Graphic, Handmade paper (Lafranca)
263 x 237mm BH (etching), 410 x 375mm BH (paper)

Two prints by Ben Nicholson, as well as the entire graphic work and some of the precious copperplate plates can be found in the Collection DKM. From a very long friendship with the paper mill owner, printer and publisher couple Hedda and François Lafranca (TI, CH) many works found their way into the Collection DKM. The handmade paper from the Ticino mountains produced, in the old tradition, gives Ben Nicholson’s prints a special, unmistakable character.

The British artist Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982), who began his career as a painter at the beginning of the 1920s and initially painted abstract landscapes and still lifes, was a member of the “abstraction-creation” group in Paris from 1933 to 1935.

During this time, he had already begun to cut curved lines into wooden boards, draw them and combine them with coloured surfaces.

In 1933 he created a series of etchings that worked – purely abstractly – only with lines and circles, and in the same year Nicholson began his first painted reliefs. In Paris he also met Piet Mondrian, with whom he subsequently became a close friend, as well as with George Braque.

In his works from the 1940s and 1950s, one can see the combination of geometric abstraction and figurative outlines. Both overlap on the painted surface and sculpturally in relief, creating interlaced fragmentary pictorial spaces that also have a very poetic effect due to their differentiated and subtly restrained coloration.

Influences of Cubism and constructivist tendencies are just as clear in Nicholson’s work as the free drawing lines of Picasso or Matisse, but he develops his very own way of representation from these inspirations.

In his large graphic work (etchings), which the Collection DKM owns almost complete, Nicholson also works with the free drawing outline. In the elementary simplification of forms, the precision of his drawing style and the sovereignly generous division on the sheet, he achieves a formal language that appears very complex in its reduction.

By restricting himself to the line, the black and white, and by dispensing with other methods for treating the printing plate, he creates concise and at the same time open forms. In “Moon over Paros” (1966), he works in the background with dark areas to indicate the night. With the few deliberately placed lines and the simple leaving of printing ink on the plate, he arrives atmospheric expression and graphic tension.

Ute Riese, 2008

Literature:
Stiftung DKM, Linien stiller Schönheit, 240 – 243, figs. 241, 242. Bon à tirer – Atelier Lafranca no. 4, Locarno, 1983, figs. 57, 90.

[1] Cf. the catalogue raisonné “Ben Nicholson, Etchings printed by François Lafranca”, Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1984. In close cooperation, Ben Nicholson and the printer and editor François Lafranca/Locarno, who met in 1965, have tested and perfected the etching technique and printing in a joint collaboration.