Dec 61 (blue rock)

Ben Nicholson moved to the canton of Ticino in Switzerland in the spring of 1958, settling in a house on the hillside above Brissago, overlooking Lake Maggiore. He had achieved significant international critical success throughout the 1950s: in 1954 he exhibited at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and just three years later he won the Guggenheim International Award for painting in 1957. He now relished living in the heart of Europe, as the move from Cornwall to a very different landscape stimulated a new phase in his art. Nicholson enthused, ‘The landscape is superb, especially in winter and when seen from the changing levels of the mountain side,’ he wrote, ‘the persistent sunlight, the bare trees seen against a translucent lake, the hard, rounded forms of the snow topped mountains, and perhaps with a late evening moon rising beyond in a pale, cerulean sky - is entirely magical and with the kind of visual poetry which I would like to find in my painting’ (the artist quoted in ‘Mr Ben Nicholson answers some questions about his work and view,’ The Times, 12 November 1959).

In Switzerland, Nicholson returned to making carved reliefs but unlike his early pure white reliefs he now painted in naturalistic earthy colours that were inspired by the quality of the natural light, evoking the landscape that he experienced around him. In the present work, the artist has reflected the sensation he experienced after a winter walk at the end of 1961. Norbert Lynton describes Nicholson's work from this period, ‘a few lines can offer space, light and scale, the essential character of the forms BN was looking at as well as the enjoyment of them; lines are as important as colour, tone and mass in the paintings and reliefs, and it is their economy that strikes one as much as their energy’ (N. Lynton, loc. cit.).