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Lot Essay
‘Smaller, mysterious, greys & brown & primitive … it has the spaciousness about it, it is real & also remote’ (Ben Nicholson describing the present work)
‘The painting was no longer a window onto the world but was the world itself’ (Jeremy Lewison)
The present work is a well-documented and highly regarded work, dating to the vital years in Nicholson’s evolution as this country’s key Modernist artists. It was almost certainly exhibited in the important 1932 exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons’ Galleries where it was bought by the friend and supporter of Ben’s early work, Cyril Reddihough. Soon afterwards, Reddihough exchanged the picture with Nicholson for another work and 1932 (guitar) became the property of Ben’s wife, the artist Barbara Hepworth, whom he had met in 1931. It is a work which has variously been known by a number of titles including: Abstraction; Balalaika; 1932 (musical instrument) and most recently, 1932 (guitar) since J.P. Hodin, writing in 1957 (op. cit.). The subject is in fact a Balalaika and is referred to as such in the Tate Gallery Archive (see TGA.4041).
During the summer months of 1931 Nicholson spent a number of weeks with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This was a critical moment for all of these artists. John Russell discusses the fusing of ideas, 'Moore in 1931 was just making a conclusive break-through to a cryptic, allusive, concentrated kind of sculpture which owed nothing to anyone in England. His blue Hornton Stone Composition (1931) was, for instance, a complete conundrum to most of his contemporaries - even if we can now relate it to Picasso's beach scenes of a year or two earlier. A certain pink alabaster sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, shown at Tooth's in 1932 [where the present work was also exhibited], and known in the 1930s as Abstraction, was also a matter of bafflement to most English collectors. Work of this sort had a radical quality, a lack of equivocation, rare in English art ... Both Moore and Hepworth at this time were convinced carvers: people for whom sculpture meant the releasing from a block of wood or stone of the form which somehow lay hidden within it. Nicholson had therefore, at his elbow a continual struggle to achieve pure form through the act of carving; and it would have been unnatural for him not to have applied a comparable development in paintings. But he had a great deal else to ponder: in the spring of 1932 he went to Paris, and for the first time had direct contact with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 19, 20).
In the early 1930s Nicholson travelled to Paris frequently, where he became increasingly inspired by experimentations of the French avant-garde art he witnessed there. In May 1930 Nicholson held his first exhibition of paintings in Paris at the celebrated galleries of Bernheim-Jeune, at 109 rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Nicholson’s friend, the painter Christopher Wood, had persuaded Georges Bernheim to allow exhibition space to be shared between the two of them. Whilst the show was not entirely a success, it did give Nicholson the opportunity to see Picasso's 'abstractions' at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, which he greatly admired and it allowed him to establish contact with Braque. Although it is unclear whether they met, Braque had seen Nicholson's exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune and through the collector H.P. Roché, Braque sent Nicholson a very favourable account of his impressions of the show. Inspired by this report, Nicholson visited France in the spring of 1933 where he befriended both Braque and Picasso.
Nicholson's paintings of the following months owe an enormous debt to both artists, inspired by their bold modernism and the infinite possibilities of experimenting with Cubism. Nicholson excitedly wrote, ‘This abstract language (of which Picasso has a more profound knowledge than anyone) is a new thing and it is misleading to people who are new to it. Certainly I feel I discover something new about it each week and in my work what I felt to be abstract two months ago hardly seems so at all now and one continues like that’ (B. Nicholson in a letter to Winifred Nicholson, dated 3 May 1933).
Nicholson relished in the interplay of forms, as seen here, juxtaposing and overlaying a series of shapes and layers of different materials to create a wonderfully visceral surface. This focus on the interchange of forms was something that Nicholson experimented with in the 1930s, culminating in his stark white reliefs of the mid 1930s.
This interest in the surface and materiality of things was not entirely new to Nicholson, however, and while we can see a link between Nicholson, Braque and Picasso in the 1920s Nicholson experimented with surface, encouraged by his meeting of fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, whose primitive and naïve paintings of Cornish scenes on scraps of cardboard and pieces of wooden board spoke to him. Peter Khoroche explains, ‘He was excited by Wallis’ ability to make pictures come alive, partly by their sheer intensity of his feeling, partly by his method of working, which allowed the make-up of the painting to be undisguised yet, through the viewer’s eye, to be transformed into a vivid experience’ (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 2).
This notion of experience was important to Nicholson who in the 1930s had developed the idea that a picture should have a life of its own, which could be as communicable as a natural phenomenon. In a statement accompanying the 1934 Unit One exhibition Nicholson wrote, 'As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity - an idea which is complete, with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time ... Painting and carving is one means of searching after this reality, and this moment has reached what is so far its most profound point. During the last epoch a vital contribution has been made by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and more recently by Arp, Miró, Calder, Hepworth, and Giacometti. These artists have the quality of true vision which makes them a part of life itself' (B. Nicholson quoted in M. de Sausmarez, 'Ben Nicholson', Studio International, 1969, p. 31).
In August 1932 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth visited Dieppe, the French sea-side town much loved by painters from days gone by including Delacroix, Degas, Sickert and Ben’s father, William Nicholson who had taken Ben there as a child. Nicholson described the 1932 visit some years later, ‘Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson, quoted in J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
On his return, in August 1932, he painted 1932 (Au Chat Botté) Manchester City Art Galleries and 1932 (guitar); the present work. Both works have comparable elements and can be seen side by side and both depict the balalaika (or guitar). Jeremy Lewison comments in the 1993 Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, ‘The depiction of musical instruments, which Nicholson favoured in 1932-33, was also a theme of Braque’s and, as Sophie Bowness has pointed out, Nicholson’s interest in such instruments coincided with the moment when Braque was most important to him’ (op. cit., p. 210).
As in 1932 (Au Chat Botté), Nicholson has adopted a strong red as a key colour note in 1932 (guitar); behind, or perhaps in front of which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible objects and ideas. The palette of each work is closely related. The even pencil line adds to the boldly inscribed lines created before the gesso-ed board had set. The composition is finished with graphite shading to give shadow at the top of the musical instrument. The impressed (or in some works, incised) line further reflected a developing interest in the painting as a three-dimensional object. The present work relates closely to other works of 1932 anticipating such works as 1932 Violin and Guitare (Collection of Hélène Rochas, sold Christie’s, Paris, 27 September 2012, lot 87 for €3,313,000); 1932 (profile – Venetian red) and 1933 (Collage with Spanish postcard) (sold in these Rooms on 2 December 1985), which shows the same horizontal red stripes, perhaps relating to a blind or slatted shutters.
Commenting on paintings from 1932 John Russell proposes, ‘Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen … irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breathe through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
The present work is a well-documented and highly regarded work, dating to the vital years in Nicholson’s evolution as this country’s key Modernist artists. It was almost certainly exhibited in the important 1932 exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons’ Galleries where it was bought by the friend and supporter of Ben’s early work, Cyril Reddihough. Soon afterwards, Reddihough exchanged the picture with Nicholson for another work and 1932 (guitar) became the property of Ben’s wife, the artist Barbara Hepworth, whom he had met in 1931. It is a work which has variously been known by a number of titles including: Abstraction; Balalaika; 1932 (musical instrument) and most recently, 1932 (guitar) since J.P. Hodin, writing in 1957 (op. cit.). The subject is in fact a Balalaika and is referred to as such in the Tate Gallery Archive (see TGA.4041).
During the summer months of 1931 Nicholson spent a number of weeks with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This was a critical moment for all of these artists. John Russell discusses the fusing of ideas, 'Moore in 1931 was just making a conclusive break-through to a cryptic, allusive, concentrated kind of sculpture which owed nothing to anyone in England. His blue Hornton Stone Composition (1931) was, for instance, a complete conundrum to most of his contemporaries - even if we can now relate it to Picasso's beach scenes of a year or two earlier. A certain pink alabaster sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, shown at Tooth's in 1932 [where the present work was also exhibited], and known in the 1930s as Abstraction, was also a matter of bafflement to most English collectors. Work of this sort had a radical quality, a lack of equivocation, rare in English art ... Both Moore and Hepworth at this time were convinced carvers: people for whom sculpture meant the releasing from a block of wood or stone of the form which somehow lay hidden within it. Nicholson had therefore, at his elbow a continual struggle to achieve pure form through the act of carving; and it would have been unnatural for him not to have applied a comparable development in paintings. But he had a great deal else to ponder: in the spring of 1932 he went to Paris, and for the first time had direct contact with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 19, 20).
In the early 1930s Nicholson travelled to Paris frequently, where he became increasingly inspired by experimentations of the French avant-garde art he witnessed there. In May 1930 Nicholson held his first exhibition of paintings in Paris at the celebrated galleries of Bernheim-Jeune, at 109 rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Nicholson’s friend, the painter Christopher Wood, had persuaded Georges Bernheim to allow exhibition space to be shared between the two of them. Whilst the show was not entirely a success, it did give Nicholson the opportunity to see Picasso's 'abstractions' at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, which he greatly admired and it allowed him to establish contact with Braque. Although it is unclear whether they met, Braque had seen Nicholson's exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune and through the collector H.P. Roché, Braque sent Nicholson a very favourable account of his impressions of the show. Inspired by this report, Nicholson visited France in the spring of 1933 where he befriended both Braque and Picasso.
Nicholson's paintings of the following months owe an enormous debt to both artists, inspired by their bold modernism and the infinite possibilities of experimenting with Cubism. Nicholson excitedly wrote, ‘This abstract language (of which Picasso has a more profound knowledge than anyone) is a new thing and it is misleading to people who are new to it. Certainly I feel I discover something new about it each week and in my work what I felt to be abstract two months ago hardly seems so at all now and one continues like that’ (B. Nicholson in a letter to Winifred Nicholson, dated 3 May 1933).
Nicholson relished in the interplay of forms, as seen here, juxtaposing and overlaying a series of shapes and layers of different materials to create a wonderfully visceral surface. This focus on the interchange of forms was something that Nicholson experimented with in the 1930s, culminating in his stark white reliefs of the mid 1930s.
This interest in the surface and materiality of things was not entirely new to Nicholson, however, and while we can see a link between Nicholson, Braque and Picasso in the 1920s Nicholson experimented with surface, encouraged by his meeting of fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, whose primitive and naïve paintings of Cornish scenes on scraps of cardboard and pieces of wooden board spoke to him. Peter Khoroche explains, ‘He was excited by Wallis’ ability to make pictures come alive, partly by their sheer intensity of his feeling, partly by his method of working, which allowed the make-up of the painting to be undisguised yet, through the viewer’s eye, to be transformed into a vivid experience’ (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 2).
This notion of experience was important to Nicholson who in the 1930s had developed the idea that a picture should have a life of its own, which could be as communicable as a natural phenomenon. In a statement accompanying the 1934 Unit One exhibition Nicholson wrote, 'As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity - an idea which is complete, with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time ... Painting and carving is one means of searching after this reality, and this moment has reached what is so far its most profound point. During the last epoch a vital contribution has been made by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and more recently by Arp, Miró, Calder, Hepworth, and Giacometti. These artists have the quality of true vision which makes them a part of life itself' (B. Nicholson quoted in M. de Sausmarez, 'Ben Nicholson', Studio International, 1969, p. 31).
In August 1932 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth visited Dieppe, the French sea-side town much loved by painters from days gone by including Delacroix, Degas, Sickert and Ben’s father, William Nicholson who had taken Ben there as a child. Nicholson described the 1932 visit some years later, ‘Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson, quoted in J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
On his return, in August 1932, he painted 1932 (Au Chat Botté) Manchester City Art Galleries and 1932 (guitar); the present work. Both works have comparable elements and can be seen side by side and both depict the balalaika (or guitar). Jeremy Lewison comments in the 1993 Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, ‘The depiction of musical instruments, which Nicholson favoured in 1932-33, was also a theme of Braque’s and, as Sophie Bowness has pointed out, Nicholson’s interest in such instruments coincided with the moment when Braque was most important to him’ (op. cit., p. 210).
As in 1932 (Au Chat Botté), Nicholson has adopted a strong red as a key colour note in 1932 (guitar); behind, or perhaps in front of which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible objects and ideas. The palette of each work is closely related. The even pencil line adds to the boldly inscribed lines created before the gesso-ed board had set. The composition is finished with graphite shading to give shadow at the top of the musical instrument. The impressed (or in some works, incised) line further reflected a developing interest in the painting as a three-dimensional object. The present work relates closely to other works of 1932 anticipating such works as 1932 Violin and Guitare (Collection of Hélène Rochas, sold Christie’s, Paris, 27 September 2012, lot 87 for €3,313,000); 1932 (profile – Venetian red) and 1933 (Collage with Spanish postcard) (sold in these Rooms on 2 December 1985), which shows the same horizontal red stripes, perhaps relating to a blind or slatted shutters.
Commenting on paintings from 1932 John Russell proposes, ‘Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen … irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breathe through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
We are very grateful to Sir Alan Bowness for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
‘The painting was no longer a window onto the world but was the world itself’ (Jeremy Lewison)
The present work is a well-documented and highly regarded work, dating to the vital years in Nicholson’s evolution as this country’s key Modernist artists. It was almost certainly exhibited in the important 1932 exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons’ Galleries where it was bought by the friend and supporter of Ben’s early work, Cyril Reddihough. Soon afterwards, Reddihough exchanged the picture with Nicholson for another work and 1932 (guitar) became the property of Ben’s wife, the artist Barbara Hepworth, whom he had met in 1931. It is a work which has variously been known by a number of titles including: Abstraction; Balalaika; 1932 (musical instrument) and most recently, 1932 (guitar) since J.P. Hodin, writing in 1957 (op. cit.). The subject is in fact a Balalaika and is referred to as such in the Tate Gallery Archive (see TGA.4041).
During the summer months of 1931 Nicholson spent a number of weeks with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This was a critical moment for all of these artists. John Russell discusses the fusing of ideas, 'Moore in 1931 was just making a conclusive break-through to a cryptic, allusive, concentrated kind of sculpture which owed nothing to anyone in England. His blue Hornton Stone Composition (1931) was, for instance, a complete conundrum to most of his contemporaries - even if we can now relate it to Picasso's beach scenes of a year or two earlier. A certain pink alabaster sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, shown at Tooth's in 1932 [where the present work was also exhibited], and known in the 1930s as Abstraction, was also a matter of bafflement to most English collectors. Work of this sort had a radical quality, a lack of equivocation, rare in English art ... Both Moore and Hepworth at this time were convinced carvers: people for whom sculpture meant the releasing from a block of wood or stone of the form which somehow lay hidden within it. Nicholson had therefore, at his elbow a continual struggle to achieve pure form through the act of carving; and it would have been unnatural for him not to have applied a comparable development in paintings. But he had a great deal else to ponder: in the spring of 1932 he went to Paris, and for the first time had direct contact with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 19, 20).
In the early 1930s Nicholson travelled to Paris frequently, where he became increasingly inspired by experimentations of the French avant-garde art he witnessed there. In May 1930 Nicholson held his first exhibition of paintings in Paris at the celebrated galleries of Bernheim-Jeune, at 109 rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Nicholson’s friend, the painter Christopher Wood, had persuaded Georges Bernheim to allow exhibition space to be shared between the two of them. Whilst the show was not entirely a success, it did give Nicholson the opportunity to see Picasso's 'abstractions' at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, which he greatly admired and it allowed him to establish contact with Braque. Although it is unclear whether they met, Braque had seen Nicholson's exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune and through the collector H.P. Roché, Braque sent Nicholson a very favourable account of his impressions of the show. Inspired by this report, Nicholson visited France in the spring of 1933 where he befriended both Braque and Picasso.
Nicholson's paintings of the following months owe an enormous debt to both artists, inspired by their bold modernism and the infinite possibilities of experimenting with Cubism. Nicholson excitedly wrote, ‘This abstract language (of which Picasso has a more profound knowledge than anyone) is a new thing and it is misleading to people who are new to it. Certainly I feel I discover something new about it each week and in my work what I felt to be abstract two months ago hardly seems so at all now and one continues like that’ (B. Nicholson in a letter to Winifred Nicholson, dated 3 May 1933).
Nicholson relished in the interplay of forms, as seen here, juxtaposing and overlaying a series of shapes and layers of different materials to create a wonderfully visceral surface. This focus on the interchange of forms was something that Nicholson experimented with in the 1930s, culminating in his stark white reliefs of the mid 1930s.
This interest in the surface and materiality of things was not entirely new to Nicholson, however, and while we can see a link between Nicholson, Braque and Picasso in the 1920s Nicholson experimented with surface, encouraged by his meeting of fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, whose primitive and naïve paintings of Cornish scenes on scraps of cardboard and pieces of wooden board spoke to him. Peter Khoroche explains, ‘He was excited by Wallis’ ability to make pictures come alive, partly by their sheer intensity of his feeling, partly by his method of working, which allowed the make-up of the painting to be undisguised yet, through the viewer’s eye, to be transformed into a vivid experience’ (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 2).
This notion of experience was important to Nicholson who in the 1930s had developed the idea that a picture should have a life of its own, which could be as communicable as a natural phenomenon. In a statement accompanying the 1934 Unit One exhibition Nicholson wrote, 'As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity - an idea which is complete, with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time ... Painting and carving is one means of searching after this reality, and this moment has reached what is so far its most profound point. During the last epoch a vital contribution has been made by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and more recently by Arp, Miró, Calder, Hepworth, and Giacometti. These artists have the quality of true vision which makes them a part of life itself' (B. Nicholson quoted in M. de Sausmarez, 'Ben Nicholson', Studio International, 1969, p. 31).
In August 1932 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth visited Dieppe, the French sea-side town much loved by painters from days gone by including Delacroix, Degas, Sickert and Ben’s father, William Nicholson who had taken Ben there as a child. Nicholson described the 1932 visit some years later, ‘Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson, quoted in J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
On his return, in August 1932, he painted 1932 (Au Chat Botté) Manchester City Art Galleries and 1932 (guitar); the present work. Both works have comparable elements and can be seen side by side and both depict the balalaika (or guitar). Jeremy Lewison comments in the 1993 Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, ‘The depiction of musical instruments, which Nicholson favoured in 1932-33, was also a theme of Braque’s and, as Sophie Bowness has pointed out, Nicholson’s interest in such instruments coincided with the moment when Braque was most important to him’ (op. cit., p. 210).
As in 1932 (Au Chat Botté), Nicholson has adopted a strong red as a key colour note in 1932 (guitar); behind, or perhaps in front of which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible objects and ideas. The palette of each work is closely related. The even pencil line adds to the boldly inscribed lines created before the gesso-ed board had set. The composition is finished with graphite shading to give shadow at the top of the musical instrument. The impressed (or in some works, incised) line further reflected a developing interest in the painting as a three-dimensional object. The present work relates closely to other works of 1932 anticipating such works as 1932 Violin and Guitare (Collection of Hélène Rochas, sold Christie’s, Paris, 27 September 2012, lot 87 for €3,313,000); 1932 (profile – Venetian red) and 1933 (Collage with Spanish postcard) (sold in these Rooms on 2 December 1985), which shows the same horizontal red stripes, perhaps relating to a blind or slatted shutters.
Commenting on paintings from 1932 John Russell proposes, ‘Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen … irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breathe through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
The present work is a well-documented and highly regarded work, dating to the vital years in Nicholson’s evolution as this country’s key Modernist artists. It was almost certainly exhibited in the important 1932 exhibition at Arthur Tooth and Sons’ Galleries where it was bought by the friend and supporter of Ben’s early work, Cyril Reddihough. Soon afterwards, Reddihough exchanged the picture with Nicholson for another work and 1932 (guitar) became the property of Ben’s wife, the artist Barbara Hepworth, whom he had met in 1931. It is a work which has variously been known by a number of titles including: Abstraction; Balalaika; 1932 (musical instrument) and most recently, 1932 (guitar) since J.P. Hodin, writing in 1957 (op. cit.). The subject is in fact a Balalaika and is referred to as such in the Tate Gallery Archive (see TGA.4041).
During the summer months of 1931 Nicholson spent a number of weeks with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This was a critical moment for all of these artists. John Russell discusses the fusing of ideas, 'Moore in 1931 was just making a conclusive break-through to a cryptic, allusive, concentrated kind of sculpture which owed nothing to anyone in England. His blue Hornton Stone Composition (1931) was, for instance, a complete conundrum to most of his contemporaries - even if we can now relate it to Picasso's beach scenes of a year or two earlier. A certain pink alabaster sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, shown at Tooth's in 1932 [where the present work was also exhibited], and known in the 1930s as Abstraction, was also a matter of bafflement to most English collectors. Work of this sort had a radical quality, a lack of equivocation, rare in English art ... Both Moore and Hepworth at this time were convinced carvers: people for whom sculpture meant the releasing from a block of wood or stone of the form which somehow lay hidden within it. Nicholson had therefore, at his elbow a continual struggle to achieve pure form through the act of carving; and it would have been unnatural for him not to have applied a comparable development in paintings. But he had a great deal else to ponder: in the spring of 1932 he went to Paris, and for the first time had direct contact with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 19, 20).
In the early 1930s Nicholson travelled to Paris frequently, where he became increasingly inspired by experimentations of the French avant-garde art he witnessed there. In May 1930 Nicholson held his first exhibition of paintings in Paris at the celebrated galleries of Bernheim-Jeune, at 109 rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Nicholson’s friend, the painter Christopher Wood, had persuaded Georges Bernheim to allow exhibition space to be shared between the two of them. Whilst the show was not entirely a success, it did give Nicholson the opportunity to see Picasso's 'abstractions' at Paul Rosenberg's gallery, which he greatly admired and it allowed him to establish contact with Braque. Although it is unclear whether they met, Braque had seen Nicholson's exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune and through the collector H.P. Roché, Braque sent Nicholson a very favourable account of his impressions of the show. Inspired by this report, Nicholson visited France in the spring of 1933 where he befriended both Braque and Picasso.
Nicholson's paintings of the following months owe an enormous debt to both artists, inspired by their bold modernism and the infinite possibilities of experimenting with Cubism. Nicholson excitedly wrote, ‘This abstract language (of which Picasso has a more profound knowledge than anyone) is a new thing and it is misleading to people who are new to it. Certainly I feel I discover something new about it each week and in my work what I felt to be abstract two months ago hardly seems so at all now and one continues like that’ (B. Nicholson in a letter to Winifred Nicholson, dated 3 May 1933).
Nicholson relished in the interplay of forms, as seen here, juxtaposing and overlaying a series of shapes and layers of different materials to create a wonderfully visceral surface. This focus on the interchange of forms was something that Nicholson experimented with in the 1930s, culminating in his stark white reliefs of the mid 1930s.
This interest in the surface and materiality of things was not entirely new to Nicholson, however, and while we can see a link between Nicholson, Braque and Picasso in the 1920s Nicholson experimented with surface, encouraged by his meeting of fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis in 1928, whose primitive and naïve paintings of Cornish scenes on scraps of cardboard and pieces of wooden board spoke to him. Peter Khoroche explains, ‘He was excited by Wallis’ ability to make pictures come alive, partly by their sheer intensity of his feeling, partly by his method of working, which allowed the make-up of the painting to be undisguised yet, through the viewer’s eye, to be transformed into a vivid experience’ (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs, Aldershot, 2002, p. 2).
This notion of experience was important to Nicholson who in the 1930s had developed the idea that a picture should have a life of its own, which could be as communicable as a natural phenomenon. In a statement accompanying the 1934 Unit One exhibition Nicholson wrote, 'As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity - an idea which is complete, with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time ... Painting and carving is one means of searching after this reality, and this moment has reached what is so far its most profound point. During the last epoch a vital contribution has been made by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and more recently by Arp, Miró, Calder, Hepworth, and Giacometti. These artists have the quality of true vision which makes them a part of life itself' (B. Nicholson quoted in M. de Sausmarez, 'Ben Nicholson', Studio International, 1969, p. 31).
In August 1932 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth visited Dieppe, the French sea-side town much loved by painters from days gone by including Delacroix, Degas, Sickert and Ben’s father, William Nicholson who had taken Ben there as a child. Nicholson described the 1932 visit some years later, ‘Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson, quoted in J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
On his return, in August 1932, he painted 1932 (Au Chat Botté) Manchester City Art Galleries and 1932 (guitar); the present work. Both works have comparable elements and can be seen side by side and both depict the balalaika (or guitar). Jeremy Lewison comments in the 1993 Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, ‘The depiction of musical instruments, which Nicholson favoured in 1932-33, was also a theme of Braque’s and, as Sophie Bowness has pointed out, Nicholson’s interest in such instruments coincided with the moment when Braque was most important to him’ (op. cit., p. 210).
As in 1932 (Au Chat Botté), Nicholson has adopted a strong red as a key colour note in 1932 (guitar); behind, or perhaps in front of which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible objects and ideas. The palette of each work is closely related. The even pencil line adds to the boldly inscribed lines created before the gesso-ed board had set. The composition is finished with graphite shading to give shadow at the top of the musical instrument. The impressed (or in some works, incised) line further reflected a developing interest in the painting as a three-dimensional object. The present work relates closely to other works of 1932 anticipating such works as 1932 Violin and Guitare (Collection of Hélène Rochas, sold Christie’s, Paris, 27 September 2012, lot 87 for €3,313,000); 1932 (profile – Venetian red) and 1933 (Collage with Spanish postcard) (sold in these Rooms on 2 December 1985), which shows the same horizontal red stripes, perhaps relating to a blind or slatted shutters.
Commenting on paintings from 1932 John Russell proposes, ‘Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen … irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breathe through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
We are very grateful to Sir Alan Bowness for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.