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Ben Nicholson began to enjoy wide international fame in the early 1950s. The British Council under the direction of Lillian Browse ran a vigorous program of exhibitions of contemporary British art abroad, particularly in Europe, and between 1947 and 1960 Nicholson participated in some forty of these. Ironically, his recognition within Britain did not keep pace with his growing fame and success abroad. Although the Tate Gallery gave him a retrospective exhibition in 1955, his solo commercial showings were often unsuccessful, even at the moment when international prizes were showered upon him: the Carnegie Institute Prize in 1952; the Guggenheim International Painting Prize in 1956; and the major foreign artist's prize at the São Paulo Biennale in 1957. A residual prejudice against abstract painting in Britain, allied to a resurgence of realism in post-war British art-alternatively Neo-Romantic and effete or "kitchen sink" and heavy-handed-made Nicholson's reputation relatively embattled. He did, however, have powerful and articulate defenders in Herbert Read and his fellow painter Patrick Heron.

Why Nicholson should have continued to arouse only grudging admiration in Britain at this period is slightly puzzling. From 1949 to 1958, his last years at St. Ives, the picturesque fishing village and artists' colony in Cornwall, he produced a magisterial series of still-life paintings of which May 1955 (Gwithian) is a particularly fine example. These pictures are far more approachable than his radically abstract white reliefs of the 1930s or his austerely geometric wartime abstractions. Anybody reasonably familiar with Cubist still lifes would have no difficulty "reading" Nicholson's paintings of the early fifties.

Interestingly, Nicholson himself attributed his interest in still life to his father, the painter William Nicholson:

I owe a lot to my father-especially to his poetic idea

and to his still-life theme. That didn't come from

Cubism, as some people think, but from my father-

not only from what he did as a painter but from the

very beautiful striped and spotted jugs and mugs and

goblets, and octagonal and hexagonal glass objects which

he collected. Having those things throughout the house was an unforgettable early experience for me.[1]

The still-life quality of May 1955 is fully realized through the interplay of transparent and opaque forms. They have a magical, almost dancing quality, as one motif overlaps and intersects with another. The unsuspected complexity of their relationships in space animates the painting.

The Nicholson still lifes of the 1950s achieved a considerable monumentality. The table in this picture has an architectural resonance, grander and more austere than the drawing and coloring of the still-life motif. The artist claimed that he had always "been interested in the sculptural-architectural approach…But I do not look for massive form…I…like to chisel out a form…& there is an excitement for me in chiselling out flat planes."[2]

This painting-one of a handsome group of Nicholsons in the Center's collection-combines the sculptural-architectural with an atmospheric quality, as though the still life were bathed in air and light. The Gwithian of the title is a village almost due east of St. Ives and was the site of some of the earliest neolithic remains in Cornwall; May 1955 echoes these ancient forms. The reference to Gwithian alludes, then, both to the landscape feeling of the work and to the artist's sense of the timeless in art. [1] Galería Jorge Mara, n.p. [2] Lewison, 75.

Patrick McCaughey

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 194, no. 81, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)