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Lot Essay
This monumental work reflects how Nicholson's working methods developed and became more ambitious in the 1960s. As Norbert Lynton relates: "the 1960s saw the reliefs again becoming his chief production. Those of the early 1960s are mostly easel-painting sized but soon they are very large indeed, tall often but mostly very wide. These had to be worked not on a table but on the floor, with the artist crawling over the surface, physically on and in the work even more directly than Jackson Pollock had been in making his paintings of 1948 and after. 'You can find out a lot about a relief', BN said, 'if you crawl over it intelligently'" (op. cit., pp. 312-313).
In March 1958, Nicholson had left England with Felicitas Vogler for Ascona and soon after they designed and built a house at Brissago, looking east across Lago Maggiore. Nicholson found a great source of inspiration in his new surroundings, stating "the landscape is superb, especially in winter and when seen from the changing levels of the mountainside. 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 with the kind of poetry which I would like to find in my painting (as quoted in N. Lynton, ibid, p. 311).
1965 (Greek Island) shows to striking effect this inspiration. Nicholson's trademark carved rectangular divisions are confident in scale, composition and tonal contrast, which appear to build-up towards the unusually liberated colouring of the massive brown rectangle to the right-hand side. The boldness, sheer scale and impressiveness of his surroundings are powerfully conveyed to great effect.
"BN rarely spoke of the subject-matter of his work, perhaps because it was the activity of making art that mattered to him, not the visual impulses behind it...His subtitles of the time mostly refer to landscape. Frequently they refer to the standing stones with which humankind asserted itself in the face of nature" (N. Lynton, ibid., p. 372).
In March 1958, Nicholson had left England with Felicitas Vogler for Ascona and soon after they designed and built a house at Brissago, looking east across Lago Maggiore. Nicholson found a great source of inspiration in his new surroundings, stating "the landscape is superb, especially in winter and when seen from the changing levels of the mountainside. 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 with the kind of poetry which I would like to find in my painting (as quoted in N. Lynton, ibid, p. 311).
1965 (Greek Island) shows to striking effect this inspiration. Nicholson's trademark carved rectangular divisions are confident in scale, composition and tonal contrast, which appear to build-up towards the unusually liberated colouring of the massive brown rectangle to the right-hand side. The boldness, sheer scale and impressiveness of his surroundings are powerfully conveyed to great effect.
"BN rarely spoke of the subject-matter of his work, perhaps because it was the activity of making art that mattered to him, not the visual impulses behind it...His subtitles of the time mostly refer to landscape. Frequently they refer to the standing stones with which humankind asserted itself in the face of nature" (N. Lynton, ibid., p. 372).