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Lot Essay
1940 (painted relief – version 1) is a compelling example of Nicholson’s evolving approach to abstraction. Gifted to the American curator James Johnson Sweeney, the work was painted at a moment of profound personal upheaval when Nicholson, his wife Barbara Hepworth, and their triplets evacuated from London to St Ives, Cornwall. While the work retains the ‘constructive’, abstract vernacular Nicholson honed throughout the 1930s – characterised by pure geometry, balance and harmonious relationships between form, line and colour – 1940 (painted relief – version 1) is markedly distinguished by a greater vibrancy in its palette.
Rising through MoMA under Alfred H. Barr to Director of Painting and Sculpture, and later serving as Director of the Guggenheim from 1952 to 1960, Sweeney was one of the most influential advocates for abstract and ‘nonobjective’ art of his generation. Shaped by formative years in Europe in the 1930s, editing the Paris journal Transition, where he collaborated with James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, Sweeney developed an intimate familiarity with the European avant-garde. It was through his connection with the French artist Jean Hélion that Sweeney was first introduced to Nicholson's work; the two painters having exchanged works with a view to introducing them to collectors in their respective countries. Following the outbreak of war, with the concentration of abstraction swept to quiet corners, Nicholson and Sweeney, now on opposite sides of the Atlantic, continued to share ideas and in this case a painting.
By this period, Nicholson was widely regarded as Britain's leading abstract artist. A founding member of Unit One and the Seven and Five Society, and a participant in the Circle and Abstraction-Création groups abroad, he was at the forefront of the Constructive movement on both sides of the Channel. His repeated travels to Paris in the early 1930s brought him into close contact with Mondrian, Gabo, Braque, and Miró, whose influence deepened his commitment to a rigorously ordered geometric abstraction. Following his celebrated series of white reliefs (1934–39) — works of austere, near-metaphysical purity, Nicholson sought a new direction, which he would find in Cornwall.
For Nicholson, Cornwall's rugged coastal landscape provided both inspiration and a new sensibility, marking a turning point in which he began to fuse the colours and experience of landscape with his pioneering abstract technique. In 1940 (painted relief – version 1), colour plays a central role in establishing form and harmonising the composition. A series of interlocking rectangular planes, carved in relief, coalesce to form a larger square. With each plane a different hue, the configuration leads the eye around the work, inviting the viewer to recreate its layered appearance perceptually. The gentler earthy tones are punctuated by more vibrant red and blues, recalling Mondrian's grids offset by primary colour. Yet, unlike Mondrian’s universal approach, Nicholson’s palette remains rooted in personal experience, evoking the blues, whites, beiges, browns and reds of sea, sky, sand, and earth. In 1969, John Russell described how ‘painting and drawing the world around him in wartime, he discovered more and more of those echoes-in-form which give so varied a resonance to his reliefs’. His phenomenological experience of landscape has been distilled to its very essence, its emotional and sensory qualities echoed in pure form and colour.
1940 (painted relief – version 1) stands as a work of quiet but profound synthesis. It distils a decade of rigorous formal experimentation into something altogether more personal — a composition in which the logic of Constructivism is gently inflected by the light, colour and spirit of the Cornish coast. That Nicholson chose to gift this work to Sweeney is telling; it passed between two figures who had each, in their own sphere, championed abstract art at a moment when the world seemed least hospitable to it. In Sweeney, Nicholson found not merely a collector but a kindred advocate — someone who understood that abstraction, far from retreating from the world, could offer one of the most searching responses to it.
Rising through MoMA under Alfred H. Barr to Director of Painting and Sculpture, and later serving as Director of the Guggenheim from 1952 to 1960, Sweeney was one of the most influential advocates for abstract and ‘nonobjective’ art of his generation. Shaped by formative years in Europe in the 1930s, editing the Paris journal Transition, where he collaborated with James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, Sweeney developed an intimate familiarity with the European avant-garde. It was through his connection with the French artist Jean Hélion that Sweeney was first introduced to Nicholson's work; the two painters having exchanged works with a view to introducing them to collectors in their respective countries. Following the outbreak of war, with the concentration of abstraction swept to quiet corners, Nicholson and Sweeney, now on opposite sides of the Atlantic, continued to share ideas and in this case a painting.
By this period, Nicholson was widely regarded as Britain's leading abstract artist. A founding member of Unit One and the Seven and Five Society, and a participant in the Circle and Abstraction-Création groups abroad, he was at the forefront of the Constructive movement on both sides of the Channel. His repeated travels to Paris in the early 1930s brought him into close contact with Mondrian, Gabo, Braque, and Miró, whose influence deepened his commitment to a rigorously ordered geometric abstraction. Following his celebrated series of white reliefs (1934–39) — works of austere, near-metaphysical purity, Nicholson sought a new direction, which he would find in Cornwall.
For Nicholson, Cornwall's rugged coastal landscape provided both inspiration and a new sensibility, marking a turning point in which he began to fuse the colours and experience of landscape with his pioneering abstract technique. In 1940 (painted relief – version 1), colour plays a central role in establishing form and harmonising the composition. A series of interlocking rectangular planes, carved in relief, coalesce to form a larger square. With each plane a different hue, the configuration leads the eye around the work, inviting the viewer to recreate its layered appearance perceptually. The gentler earthy tones are punctuated by more vibrant red and blues, recalling Mondrian's grids offset by primary colour. Yet, unlike Mondrian’s universal approach, Nicholson’s palette remains rooted in personal experience, evoking the blues, whites, beiges, browns and reds of sea, sky, sand, and earth. In 1969, John Russell described how ‘painting and drawing the world around him in wartime, he discovered more and more of those echoes-in-form which give so varied a resonance to his reliefs’. His phenomenological experience of landscape has been distilled to its very essence, its emotional and sensory qualities echoed in pure form and colour.
1940 (painted relief – version 1) stands as a work of quiet but profound synthesis. It distils a decade of rigorous formal experimentation into something altogether more personal — a composition in which the logic of Constructivism is gently inflected by the light, colour and spirit of the Cornish coast. That Nicholson chose to gift this work to Sweeney is telling; it passed between two figures who had each, in their own sphere, championed abstract art at a moment when the world seemed least hospitable to it. In Sweeney, Nicholson found not merely a collector but a kindred advocate — someone who understood that abstraction, far from retreating from the world, could offer one of the most searching responses to it.