1938
1938
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 2008
© Ben Nicholson/DACS, London. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia
- Gallery location
- Late 19th & early 20th Century Paintings & Decorative Arts Gallery
Level 2, NGV International
About this work
Ben Nicholson is regarded as the leader of the abstract movement in Britain, as he abandoned his ‘realistic’ treatments of the material world to focus upon the transcendental relationships between forms. From the 1920s he restricted himself to using only circles, squares and rectangles and simplified his palette, briefly eliminating colour altogether. Heralding Nicholson’s return to colour, 1938 was painted while Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, were sheltering the painter Piet Mondrian in London after he fled encroaching fascism in Europe. Infrared photography reveals a more prominent yellow grid underneath the present composition, anticipating the iconic yellow lattices of Mondrian’s later New York canvases.
Artwork Details
inscribed in fibre-tipped pen on reverse u.c.r.: Top / (upward arrow) Ben Nicholson 1938
Purchased with funds donated by Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 2008
© Ben Nicholson/DACS, London. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited
Level 2, NGV International