Goblets (pink marble)

"These intimations of earth and stone were put aside, however, in the long series of paintings, most of them on pretexts from still-life, which began in 1947 and carried on at least into 1953. These paintings were high and light in key, spatially quite flat, and discontinuous in style - varied, that is to say, with areas of severe line-drawing and broad, soft washes of pure colour. They were enormously free in thier procedures, dealt with subject-matter long familiar but in no way staled, and came in a wide variety of formats. They used colours like pink and pale blue and magenta. They were, in fact, the repository of a whole world of delicate off-balance colour effects. The patches of colour were sharp-edged, beak- or cutlass-shaped, triangular and cut as if with a razor. They stood for an aerial high spirits, an incorpoareal gaiety, which are unique in English art. They remind us of how Nicholson said of certain paintings by Matisse that they look 'as if the paint had been wished on to the canvas'. But at the smae time they packed in a great deal of information about the univeral kinship of meaningful forms." (J. Russell, Ben Nicholson, London 1969, p. 33).