Lot Essay
Nicholson first visited Mondrian's studio in Paris in December 1934. His influence on Nicholson was immediate; "the thing I remembered most was the feeling of light in his room and the pauses and silences during and after he had been talking. The feeling in his studio must have been very like the feeling in one of those hermits' caves where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws!". This serenity and balance, as well as a more Mondrianesque approach to purity of colour, began to appear in Nicholson's own paintings. This development is best described by Leslie Martin in the third issue of Focus 3. Reviewing the Lefevre Gallery exhibition of 1939, Martin wrote: "One of the most important aspects of painting in this category is its constructive use of colour; in Nicholson's work this is illustrated by several developments. First by his adoption of primary colours. Probably for the sake of complete clarity, red, yellow and blue, together with white and black, were added to the neutral background that had been used in earlier work. These basic colours avoided ambiguity; they worked with a maximum intensity; they displayed in the clearest way colour properties, effects of projection and recession. The colours became forces and thrusts posed against each other and maintaining equilibrium only by their exact balance. Once these stages had been worked out, the colour range was gradually enlarged until, in the latest paintings, many varieties of colour have been included, but always with this condition, that each colour performs a special function in relation to the other colours of the painting - it becomes a constructive element. The process is a positive one, and for this reason Nicholson's work in the present exhibition is more aptly described by the term 'constructive', than by the word abstract, which implies an opposite procedure".