March 19-54 (single circle)

Painted at the height of his international career and in the year that Nicholson was awarded his own retrospective exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the present work is a composition made up of geometric forms drawn onto the softly painted surface of the artist’s own prepared board. The earthy colour tones are redolent of the Cornish landscape, and the inclusion of a single circle evokes his earlier white relief paintings from the mid-1930s.

By the 1950s Nicholson’s work had developed as a result of the time he had spent drawing in the intervening war period when materials were scarce. Jeremy Lewison has noted ‘the beginnings of this new approach where a textured paint surface is enlivened by bold and rhythmic drawing … Nicholson used line more or less to create tension … the contrast between angular and cursive lines may suggest hard and soft, sharp and blunt, warm and cool, acceptance and repulsion, maternal and paternal. Oval shapes which occur frequently in painting … suggest notions of reproduction and birth, of emerging life. Again, these show an affinity with the work of Hepworth. Thus the spectator can read the still life as containing a range of emotions and experiences of life, if he so chooses (exhibition catalogue, Ben Nicholson, Tate, 1983, p. 88).

We are very grateful to Rachel Smith and Lee Beard for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.