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Lot Essay
During the summer months of 1931 Nicholson spent a number of weeks with Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens. This was a critical moment for all of these artists. John Russell discusses this fusing of ideas, 'Moore in 1931 was just making a conclusive break-through to a cryptic, allusive, concentrated kind of sculpture which owed nothing to anyone in England. His blue Hornton Stone Composition (1931) was, for instance, a complete conundrum to most of his contemporaries - even if we can now relate it to Picasso's beach scenes of a year or two earlier. A certain pink alabaster sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, shown at Tooth's in 1932, and known in the 1930s as Abstraction, was also a matter of bafflement to most English collectors. Work of this sort had a radical quality, a lack of equivocation, rare in English art ... Both Moore and Hepworth at this time were convinced carvers: people for whom sculpture meant the releasing from a block of wood or stone of the form which somehow lay hidden within it. Nicholson had therefore, at his elbow a continual struggle to achieve pure form through the act of carving; and it would have been unnatural for him not to have applied a comparable development in paintings. But he had a great deal else to ponder: in the spring of 1932 he went to Paris, and for the first time had direct contact with Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp. Later, he and Hepworth went to Dieppe, staying with Alexander Calder at Varengeville and visited Braque.
All painters love Dieppe. Since Delacroix, since Degas, since Sickert and since William Nicholson, it has exerted a kind of beneficient white magic upon them. Nicholson went there as a child, and in 1932 he went there for a few days with Barbara Hepworth. He described it some years later. Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live.'
This is not only true of Au Chat Botté but of at least two other paintings painted in Dieppe in 1932. They have an august ancestor in one of the greatest paintings of this century, Braque's Café Bar (1919), now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel. But this is above all things a masterpiece of palpable fact: Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen. The Braque is put together with a ferocious logic and a passion to go on adding fact to fact until the picture was complete. The Nicholson is factual, here and there, but it is also a dream: a disembodiment of the familiar.
In Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breath through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
The present work echoes the ideas of Au Chat Botté (Manchester City Art Galleries). Nicholson has adopted the bold red as his main colour note, behind which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible profiles of objects, letter and numbers. Pencil line adds to the incised lines in the worked board to bring out the profile of a bottle. Beneath the central rectangular area of the composition, barely visible but clear in capital letters the artist has added M. PAILLARD offering a hint that this may have an association with a different shop window in Northern France or simply the half-hidden abstract nature of the letters themselves.
All painters love Dieppe. Since Delacroix, since Degas, since Sickert and since William Nicholson, it has exerted a kind of beneficient white magic upon them. Nicholson went there as a child, and in 1932 he went there for a few days with Barbara Hepworth. He described it some years later. Walking past the shop-fronts, he noticed one which suggested to him a further inter-changeabilty in the table-top idea. 'The name of the shop was "Au Chat Botté", and this set going a train of thoughts connected with the fairytales of my childhood and, being in France, and my French being a little mysterious, the words themselves had an almost abstract quality - but what was important was that this name was printed in very lovely red lettering on the glass window - giving one plane - and in this window were reflections of what was behind me as I looked in - giving a second plane - while through the window objects on a table were performing a kind of ballet and forming the "eye" or life-point of the painting - giving a third plane. These three planes and all their subsidiary planes were interchangeable, so that you could not tell which was real and which was unreal, what was reflected and what was unreflected, and this created, as I see now, some kind of space or an imaginative world in which one could live.'
This is not only true of Au Chat Botté but of at least two other paintings painted in Dieppe in 1932. They have an august ancestor in one of the greatest paintings of this century, Braque's Café Bar (1919), now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel. But this is above all things a masterpiece of palpable fact: Nicholson was aiming, as he said, to blend the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen. The Braque is put together with a ferocious logic and a passion to go on adding fact to fact until the picture was complete. The Nicholson is factual, here and there, but it is also a dream: a disembodiment of the familiar.
In Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, irregularities of surface are made for their own sake, much as Picasso and Braque had welcomed sand into certain paintings. These paintings are the purest Nicholson: the fastidious fine-drawn line, the paint so transparent that the support seems to breath through it, the delineation of objects which looks casual and elliptic but is really very much to the point. They give the feeling of life being lived on many levels, and of a world in which the image and the word are equal. The sheer felicity of marks on the board or canvas, the refusal to press, the absolutely individual sense of design - all these were to recur in Nicholson's later work. For the first time he was completely himself in his painting' (see J. Russell (intro.), Ben Nicholson drawings paintings and reliefs 1911 - 1968, London, 1969, pp. 20, 21).
The present work echoes the ideas of Au Chat Botté (Manchester City Art Galleries). Nicholson has adopted the bold red as his main colour note, behind which there is a palimpsest of visible and partly-visible profiles of objects, letter and numbers. Pencil line adds to the incised lines in the worked board to bring out the profile of a bottle. Beneath the central rectangular area of the composition, barely visible but clear in capital letters the artist has added M. PAILLARD offering a hint that this may have an association with a different shop window in Northern France or simply the half-hidden abstract nature of the letters themselves.