Unravelling Ben Nicholson's Self Portrait of 1954

by Sally Lescher

Ben Nicholson shunned publicity, avoided having his photograph taken, disliked the cult of the artist as a personality, and seldom turned up at his opening nights. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he avoided self portraiture. Portrait of the Artist, 1954, is a rare example. It was commissioned for the July 1954 issue of Art News and Review, a serious art fortnightly which published the portrait of a leading artist, together with an article about his or her work, on its front cover. Critics have avoided discussing it on several grounds, citing Nicholson's sense of privacy and the work's opacity. However, in accepting this commission, surely he is putting himself in the public arena and inviting the viewer to engage with this enigmatic image.

To anyone familiar with Nicholson's art, this drawing might come as a surprise. In the accompanying article, Hodin writes that his work of this period has 'reached a style both mature and elegant, comparable to the intricate craft and art of the fugue'. It is spare and minimal. Its carefully balanced, flowing lines of jugs and mugs, tabletops, windows, townscape, landscape and seascape elements interlock with each other in elegant harmony.

 

In the portrait, however, we are confronted with violence and chaos. There are forcefully drawn symbols that seem to come from the occult; interlocking and disconnected profiles; a series of three intense eyes, one with vigorously drawn circles; the whole piece of paper is scattered with rubbed down but recognisable leitmotifs of mug handles, trees, scimitar shapes reminiscent of his beloved cats' tails, and the familiar lines of the headland across St Ives bay, semi-obliterated by a huge series of circular scribbles, shaded black. As a self portrait it intrigues and invites many questions.

The most obvious question is, knowing that Ben Nicholson disliked propagating images of himself, why did he accept the commission? To approach this it is interesting to look the context of it. It was a period when, according to Patrick Heron, Ben Nicholson was 'profoundly depressed' and thought he 'had reached the last green (golf)'. The reason he gives was that ' an international reputation with the avant garde, dating from the 1930s, still did not add up to selling prices that were not an insult; nor to anything remotely resembling critical justice from the press of his own country'. The British public, as a whole, still did not understand or accept abstraction. There was a revival of realism in the Kitchen Sink painters and an interest in the new schools of American abstract painting that were being shown in the Tate for the first time in the 1950s. To some, these made his form of cubist idiom look outmoded. Ironically, in critical terms, he was approaching the peak of his career; he had had more International shows than any other artist except Moore, and, in 1952, his Poisonous Yellow won first prize at the 39th International Exhibition, Pittsburgh. The yellow wash over this drawing may even be an oblique reminder of this. In 1953, the year before the portrait, he was selected to represent Britain at the XXVII Venice Biennale with 53 paintings and reliefs. Much to his fury though, instead of being the sole representative, he was to share the pavilion, the larger part of the space going to a young artist, Francis Bacon, whose troubled, romantic, expressionist work was in complete contrast to his own controlled classicism. He wrote complaining to Herbert Read, and his complaints are echoed in Hodin's text, where he champions Nicholson's work against Bacon's. It is possible, therefore, that Nicholson saw the commission as an opportunity to vent his frustration and to remind the public of his contribution to modernism and his position as Britain's leading artist.

Having accepted the commission, he successfully eschews giving us a physical likeness for - what? How do we unravel the iconography? Ben Nicholson seems to give us a key in the top left corner with the ciphers that are so unlike anything in his work; they are in fact Miró's favourite symbols of the moon, star and maize circle and may be a way of acknowledging his debt to him. On his early visits to Paris, he saw a Miró; it was, he said, "the first free painting that I saw and it made a deep impression". "In cubism there was yet some link with representation, in this Miró there was none. Cubism was not completely free in the sense of music." His search for freedom goes back to the beginning of his career. The son of a successful still life and landscape painter, Sir William Nicholson, he was conscious that his father had taken his way of painting to the limit of its possibilities and he wanted to find his own modern means of expression. He found inspiration in his search for a new style on his visits to Paris, firstly in the 1920s with his wife, Winifred, and then, in the early 1930s, with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Paris was the centre of the modernist movement and he threw himself into it. He was excited by the Cubist possibilities of playing with multiple viewpoints and interweaving different spatial planes in one work; he visited Mondrian's studio which opened his sensibility to the possibilities of depicting the sensation of pure space; he was invited to join the Parisian society of Painters and Sculptors and the Abstraction-Création movement where he met other members such as Arp and Calder, whose free flowing mobiles are possibly the root inspiration for his own free flowing line.

The real achievement that grew out of the Paris period, in terms of his own contribution to International Abstract Art, was the white reliefs with their carved and incised squares and circles. They were the most severely abstract of his works and idealistically related to the Constructivist vision that pure painting, sculpture and architecture could and should all be integrated in an ideal world. Although he was not given to intellectual theorising, the system sat well with his deeply held Christian Science beliefs, encouraged by his Mother and Winifred, who were both keen practitioners. On the philosophical level, one of its main teachings was that the individual should seek the eternal harmony and perfection that lies behind all the ugliness and chaos of the appearances of the world we live in. Ben Nicholson seems to affirm the connection between this and his painting when he says,

"As I see it, painting and religious experience are the same thing, and what we are all searching for is the understanding and realization of infinity - an idea which is complete with no beginning, no end, and therefore giving to all things for all time."

Ben Nicholson worked hard at introducing modernism into England. He wanted to pull British art out of its provincialism and help it onto the international stage. He was at the centre of a circle that included, amongst others, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and the influential critic, Herbert Read. As war was threatening, he encouraged leading international artists including Nuam Gabo to come to London so that, between 1935 and 1939, it became the centre for European modernist art and architecture. These were all major achievements that are obliquely hinted at in this image and summarised in the text.

Returning to the portrait drawing, it is striking that a line leads down directly from the Mirò symbols to a section of a typical 1950s Ben Nicholson Cornwall painting. By this time, he had softened his style. Gradually, he introduced and then wove together landscape elements with still life, mainly the jugs, mugs, and other vessels that he loved for their outlines. The flattened interchangeable planes, the undefined but felt space, and the subtle, faintly suggested colouring are all a poem suggestive of a deeply felt response to a particular place and time of day. As in those paintings, so in this drawing, there is a feeling of layers of experience and memory; beneath the top surface, there are the barely discernible skeletons of trees, the hint of the headland opposite St Ives resembling luscious lips. It bears out his statement "Abstract painting comes from looking at the sea, the land, the sky. It is a visual experience. How could it be anything else? One is what one has seen." It also brings to mind his enthusiastic statement to Hodin in the 1959 Cornish Review interview, "Can you imagine the excitement which a line gives you when you draw it across a surface? It is like walking through the country from St Ives to Zennor."

Nicholson had encouraged other artists such as Gabo to join him in Cornwall, and with Barbara, by then his wife, he continued to push the modernist cause, drawing many of the local artists into it. Though they were largely responsible for turning St Ives from a seaside artists' colony into a centre of modernist art, Ben eventually suffered professional frustration there too. He, Barbara, Peter Lanyon, Bernard Leach, and a number of others had founded an alternative art society, the Penwith, which Ben and Barbara, the self-styled leaders of the modernist art faction, tried to control stylistically. Peter Lanyon, whom Ben had tutored in 1939, fell out with them over their insistence on the division of abstract and representational artists and the whole matter declined into a bitter bickering match carried out in the local press.

There was enough going on in his professional life in St Ives to account for the frustration and claustrophobia that is conveyed in the drawing. His personal life was no more satisfactory and it is interesting to question why, in a self portrait, there are three or even four profiles and whose might they be. Angela Verren-Taunt partially answers this in her posthumous note on Ben Nicholson: "He said that human relations were what mattered more than anything else to him. I would have thought that he would have put his work first, but I could see that his work was so dependent on good human relations". The only other portrait works he did were in Paris in 1930s, also interlinked forms, depicting himself and Barbara Hepworth at the height of their romance. The interweaving appeared to suggest a passionate union of mind, body and soul. The union was not without problems as Ben was still married to Winifred who wanted him to come back to her and the children. He had a lifelong love and respect for her, and was always seeking her approval and ideas on his work. Norbert Lynton suggests that the third figure in the 1930s work, St Remy, Provence, could be interpreted either as a mirror image, or as the presence of Winifred in the relationship. The intertwined profiles on our 1954 self portrait are surely an oblique reference to these earlier ones.

By the date of the second work, Ben and Barbara's relationship had been fractured by the hardships of war, Barbara's ferocious dedication to her work and Ben's need for constant female company. He was courting Rhoda Littler, a talented painter who was running a market garden business with her husband, Nathaniel. They played golf together at Lelant, listened to Wimbledon together and enjoyed each other's company on coastal walks. She was twenty one years his junior, attractive and fun. He particularly admired her profile and this may have prompted another playful intertwining. This second love triangle turned into an emotional switchback for Ben; highs when he thought she might leave her husband for him; lows when she went back to the marital home. Intermittently, he returned to Barbara. It all represented a crisis for Ben as, according to Felicitas Vogler and Angela Verren Taunt, women with whom Ben Nicholson was closely associated later, he needed to have a woman in his life in order to be able to work. The crisis was further complicated in that he was undergoing a period of Adlerian analysis with a friend, Ernan Forbes-Dennis. Concurrently, he managed to persuade Rhoda to undergo it too, in the mistaken certainty that Ernan would try to persuade her to leave Nathaniel for him. By 1953, Ernan collapsed from overwork, Rhoda returned to her husband and one of Ben's beloved cats, given to him by Rhoda, died of flu due to his neglect.

The portrait drawing could be looked at in the light of the Adlerian approach to analysis and self-fulfilment. On an individual level, Adler expressed the critical question facing each person as, "What will be your contribution to life? Will it be on the useful or useless side of life?" Life training was focused on handling the three tasks of life - work, community, and love - in a satisfactory way. It appears from what we know of Nicholson's life at this period that there were many unresolved difficulties in all three of these tasks, and he is expressing them here. Where work was concerned, his position as the leading modernist painter in England was being threatened, even before it had become fully accepted. Where community was concerned, St Ives had become a nest of vipers. Where love was concerned, although he always relied on the life-long support of various women in his life such as Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, his current liaison with Rhoda Littler swung between joy and frustration, increasingly the latter.

Taken in this way, it is a fascinating and intriguing portrait; the whole piece of paper represents Ben Nicholson: the things he sees, those he has made and loves, the things that have contributed to the making of his art, the ideas that contribute to his philosophy of life, and most of all, perhaps, the frustrations he was feeling at that moment. At the same time, it is atypical of his work which is normally serene, elegant and dandified and not revealing of inner or outer turmoil. Perhaps it illustrates visually Margaret Gardiner's sympathetic pen portrait: "Ben, with his immense charm, his careless elegance, his warmth and generosity, his cussedness and sometimes downright cruelty, his deep seriousness, his jokiness, and above all his utter dedication to his work still remains - as he always was - complex and contradictory."

© Sally Lescher, 2005

A slightly longer version of this article is available with acknowledgements, notes and bibliography on request I am an art adviser, specialising principally in 20th Century British modernist art. I have an MA in Ancient and Modern Literature and Languages from Trinity College, Dublin, a general degree in the History of Art from the University of London and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where my subject was Papal patronage in 17th. century Rome. This may sound remote from my activities today but I find fascinating parallels in the underlying psychology of collecting modern art then and now. Additionally, I have trained as a picture restorer and bring this detailed practical approach to looking at paintings and to curating collections. I am interested in many periods of art, but, time being limited, I concentrate on modern British painting and sculpture which I find totally absorbing. I have often dreamed of developing the creative writing side a little more, which is why I attended the course at Peralta in October 2004. It turned out to be extremely helpful and stimulating. Contact details: sally.lescher@dsl.pipex.com