Ben Nicholson: Lines and Still life

Ben Nicholson was one of that glorious generation of British artists who reached their peak between the two wars. He is best known for abstract work, deeply rooted in the landscape and more often than not built up in near-monochromatic relief. I don't want to talk about that today; doubtless you've seen it all before.

Instead, I want to show you two things I stumbled upon, one from each end of his career.

His father, Sir William Nicholson, was a well regarded painter of still lives and so Nicholson grew up both steeped in this tradition and surrounded by eminently paintable gewgaws. As a child he must have learned to see objects and maybe the wider world as elements of compositions, as vignettes and dioramas so it should be no surprise that early in his career he should follow in his father's footsteps.

This, from the British Museum's excellent collection of works on paper, is a linocut from 1928 called Three Mugs and a Bowl. Already it contains all the elements that define Nicholson's work - graphic simplicity, elegance of line, limited palette, an awareness of substance and texture and, above all, clarity and decisiveness. Technically it is fascinating: according to the British Museum's notes here Nicholson all but let the ink dry before taking the impression and this created the texture. I can see in this a lot of parallels with his more famous work - the process of cutting, coating, colouring and texturing a surface and then combining it with a support is the same whether printing or making a collage or relief - the only real difference being that the surface is then peeled away from the paper again when printing but left attached to the canvas or board when building a relief.

This intriguing little thing is "Cluster of Spanners" from 1973 and is painted and drawn on mounted paper. I found it on the pages of the art broker Waterhouse Dodd. The similarities with the print from 45 years earlier are remarkable - the simple outlines, the overlapping forms which are both separate and merging into each other, the approach to space and surface. The main difference is perhaps a denial of physicality rather than an embrace of it within the image.

Seeing this continuity has set me thinking. If I wasn't aware of the other things Nicholson had done in between I would seriously question the lack of growth and maybe accuse him of stagnation. This would be unfair though as his oeuvre was inventive if narrow so it is more that this is marking a point at which he had come almost full circle. I suddenly find myself regarding the things he did in between in a way that hasn't occurred to me before. Was Nicholson, when making reliefs all filled with crisp but disappearing edges and small but changing spatial relationships, actually exploring the mechanics of the still life? Was he making constructions that were both the subject and the depiction of that subject at the same time? If so, that is monumentally ambitious, about as extreme as Modernism can be and perhaps even a pre-cursor to Post-Modernism.