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拍品專文
In the spring of 1933 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, paid one of their frequent visits to France to meet with avant-garde artists such as Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi in Paris, Pablo Picasso at his chateau in Boisgeloup and their new friend Georges Braque in Varengeville. During this honeymoon period for the young British couple, they also paid a brief visit to Avignon and St Rémy in the south and it was either there, or soon afterwards, that Nicholson created Le Petit Provençal.
Comprising of a series of visual puns, multiple viewpoints, an ambiguous, multidimensional use of space and a sensuous, carefully-worked and highly material surface, this collage-painting is a fusion of not only almost all of Nicholson’s styles and motifs from this seminal period but also of everything that was important to him at this time. In both its style and material execution, for example, as well as in its use of collage, newspaper lettering and its essentially Cubist fusion of abstract and pictorial space, Le Petit Provençal is a work that closely echoes Braque’s post-Cubist painting. Nicholson had grown close to Braque at this time and was very much under his influence ever since meeting the older artist not long after Braque had written to him to express his admiration for the pictures he had seen at Nicholson’s 1930, Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in Paris. In its subtle use of mottled colour and its delicate but sensitive scratching and modulation of the surface, Le Petit Provençal evidently owes much to Braque.
In addition to this, however, Le Petit Provençal is also a work that, with its distinctly Picasso-esque combination of two separate profiles merging into the form of one head, evidently reflects upon both Picasso’s latest creations of Marie-Therese Walter at Boisgeloup and more directly upon Nicholson’s own, similarly playful, fusions of his and Hepworth’s profiles in a whole series of recent pictures. In particular, Le Petit Provençal relates closely to two other important ‘Provençal’ pictures from this period: Nicholson’s 1933 (St Rémy) now in the Manchester City Art Gallery and St Rémy of 1933 in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Like these pictures, Le Petit Provençal is one of the very last of Nicholson’s paintings of the human figure. An encounter with Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1934 and his continuing close working relationship with Hepworth would lead Nicholson entirely into the world of non-objectivity for the rest of this decisive decade of his career. In these last figurative paintings of the 1930s, however, Nicholson was already beginning to explore the abstract power of open and multidimensional pictorial space. These experiments had first been prompted by seeing a multifaceted configuration of space, objects and text while looking into a shop window with Hepworth in Dieppe on an earlier visit to France in the summer of 1932. As Nicholson later recalled, with his ‘French being a little mysterious, the words [in the window gained] an 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” of 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 unreal, what was reflected and what unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space of an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson ‘Notes on Abstract Art’, Horizon, vol. 4, October 1941).
In the first of his paintings to draw upon this revelatory experience, (Au chat Botté of 1932), Nicholson fused the image of Hepworth’s head with the interior scene and the plane of the window and its lettering to create a deliberately ambiguous and abstracted pictorial unity. A similar principle, exploring this same, new ‘imaginative’ space is also at work in Le Petit Provençal. The newspaper, Le Petit Provençal, was a socialist-leaning, Republican publication based in Marseilles that was eventually closed down by the Vichy government in 1944. Here, Nicholson has taken the real newspaper and affixed it to the front of the canvas. This ‘real’ and graphic element is then fused using painterly shadows into a brilliantly textured but ultimately ambiguous background space that is articulated solely by shifting grey planes and dramatic, horizontal red lines around a central figure comprised of two profiles, one of which also cuts through and appears to be part of the newspaper. The material physicality of the newspaper and its prominent date - Monday April 17 1933 - emblazoned in the foreground of the picture both seem to fix the shifting forms of the background into a specific time and space. At the same time, and in deliberate contrast, everything else in the picture - from the lyrical lines and gently interflowing forms to the subtly rendered shadows of the background – is unfixed and instead suggestive of movement, fluidity: of a world in flux and of the fleeting temporality of the moment.
We are very grateful to Rachel Smith and Lee Beard for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Comprising of a series of visual puns, multiple viewpoints, an ambiguous, multidimensional use of space and a sensuous, carefully-worked and highly material surface, this collage-painting is a fusion of not only almost all of Nicholson’s styles and motifs from this seminal period but also of everything that was important to him at this time. In both its style and material execution, for example, as well as in its use of collage, newspaper lettering and its essentially Cubist fusion of abstract and pictorial space, Le Petit Provençal is a work that closely echoes Braque’s post-Cubist painting. Nicholson had grown close to Braque at this time and was very much under his influence ever since meeting the older artist not long after Braque had written to him to express his admiration for the pictures he had seen at Nicholson’s 1930, Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in Paris. In its subtle use of mottled colour and its delicate but sensitive scratching and modulation of the surface, Le Petit Provençal evidently owes much to Braque.
In addition to this, however, Le Petit Provençal is also a work that, with its distinctly Picasso-esque combination of two separate profiles merging into the form of one head, evidently reflects upon both Picasso’s latest creations of Marie-Therese Walter at Boisgeloup and more directly upon Nicholson’s own, similarly playful, fusions of his and Hepworth’s profiles in a whole series of recent pictures. In particular, Le Petit Provençal relates closely to two other important ‘Provençal’ pictures from this period: Nicholson’s 1933 (St Rémy) now in the Manchester City Art Gallery and St Rémy of 1933 in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Like these pictures, Le Petit Provençal is one of the very last of Nicholson’s paintings of the human figure. An encounter with Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1934 and his continuing close working relationship with Hepworth would lead Nicholson entirely into the world of non-objectivity for the rest of this decisive decade of his career. In these last figurative paintings of the 1930s, however, Nicholson was already beginning to explore the abstract power of open and multidimensional pictorial space. These experiments had first been prompted by seeing a multifaceted configuration of space, objects and text while looking into a shop window with Hepworth in Dieppe on an earlier visit to France in the summer of 1932. As Nicholson later recalled, with his ‘French being a little mysterious, the words [in the window gained] an 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” of 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 unreal, what was reflected and what unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space of an imaginative world in which one could live’ (B. Nicholson ‘Notes on Abstract Art’, Horizon, vol. 4, October 1941).
In the first of his paintings to draw upon this revelatory experience, (Au chat Botté of 1932), Nicholson fused the image of Hepworth’s head with the interior scene and the plane of the window and its lettering to create a deliberately ambiguous and abstracted pictorial unity. A similar principle, exploring this same, new ‘imaginative’ space is also at work in Le Petit Provençal. The newspaper, Le Petit Provençal, was a socialist-leaning, Republican publication based in Marseilles that was eventually closed down by the Vichy government in 1944. Here, Nicholson has taken the real newspaper and affixed it to the front of the canvas. This ‘real’ and graphic element is then fused using painterly shadows into a brilliantly textured but ultimately ambiguous background space that is articulated solely by shifting grey planes and dramatic, horizontal red lines around a central figure comprised of two profiles, one of which also cuts through and appears to be part of the newspaper. The material physicality of the newspaper and its prominent date - Monday April 17 1933 - emblazoned in the foreground of the picture both seem to fix the shifting forms of the background into a specific time and space. At the same time, and in deliberate contrast, everything else in the picture - from the lyrical lines and gently interflowing forms to the subtly rendered shadows of the background – is unfixed and instead suggestive of movement, fluidity: of a world in flux and of the fleeting temporality of the moment.
We are very grateful to Rachel Smith and Lee Beard for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.