Lot Essay
Wicca is closely related in style to Contrapuntal (Arts Council Collection, Arts Council of Great Britain), an equally large work executed the previous month in a vertical format. When exhibited together during the 1978 Ben Nicholson exhibition, Steven A. Nash wrote:
Both works make use of rather pungent hues which
sound out with a high-pitched clarity, and effect
reinforced by the steely sharpness of the
intersecting arcs and planes. In both cases the
colored shapes at the left, which strongly articulate
the surface, are contrasted with the airy space
of the open silhouettes at the right. (S.A. Nash,
exh. cat., Ben Nicholson, Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Buffalo, 1978, op. cit., p. 101)
In response to criticism to the acquisition by the Manchester City Art Gallery of an important Nicholson from the early 1950s, a work dismissed as being "too Modern", the artist wrote about the "new freedom" art had gained from the example of Cézanne:
How can one paint, as John Wells has remarked, the
noise of a beetle crawling across a rock? The poetic experience of such an event can only be realized in a
painting by an equivalent, out of the painter's total experience, when it can become all things to all men,
all beetles to all rocks.... 'Cubism' once discovered
could not be undiscovered and so far from being that
'passing phase' so longed for by reactionaries it (and
all that its discovery implied) has been absorbed into
human experience as we know it today. Painting today,
and it was Cézanne who made the first vital moves,
and Picasso and Braque--and Mondrian--who carried the discovery further, is a bird on the wing. (N. Lyton,
Ben Nicholson, London, 119, pp. 251-251)
Both works make use of rather pungent hues which
sound out with a high-pitched clarity, and effect
reinforced by the steely sharpness of the
intersecting arcs and planes. In both cases the
colored shapes at the left, which strongly articulate
the surface, are contrasted with the airy space
of the open silhouettes at the right. (S.A. Nash,
exh. cat., Ben Nicholson, Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Buffalo, 1978, op. cit., p. 101)
In response to criticism to the acquisition by the Manchester City Art Gallery of an important Nicholson from the early 1950s, a work dismissed as being "too Modern", the artist wrote about the "new freedom" art had gained from the example of Cézanne:
How can one paint, as John Wells has remarked, the
noise of a beetle crawling across a rock? The poetic experience of such an event can only be realized in a
painting by an equivalent, out of the painter's total experience, when it can become all things to all men,
all beetles to all rocks.... 'Cubism' once discovered
could not be undiscovered and so far from being that
'passing phase' so longed for by reactionaries it (and
all that its discovery implied) has been absorbed into
human experience as we know it today. Painting today,
and it was Cézanne who made the first vital moves,
and Picasso and Braque--and Mondrian--who carried the discovery further, is a bird on the wing. (N. Lyton,
Ben Nicholson, London, 119, pp. 251-251)