Ben Nicholson: abstracts
Ben Nicholson was an experimental artist, familiar with the work of avant-garde continental artists such as Picasso, Braque, Schwitters, Mondrian and Gabo. Much of Nicholson's own work is a personal interpretation of ideas and methods derived from these European models, making Nicholson a leading exponent of Modernism in England in the 1930s. Nicholson's 1924 (first abstract painting, Chelsea) fits Charles Greenberg's definition of modernist painting in that it is flat, without perspective depth, and does not try to conceal the materials from which it has been made: the pencil guidelines and the brush marks are both clearly visible. Nicholson's picture has not been abstracted from forms seen in nature, but is entirely the product of his imagination. Thus the painting is an autonomous thing in its own right and does not represent anything other than itself. As Nicholson said himself, an abstract painting is like a flower: "Each flower exists in its own right - it...