Ben Nicholson 1894-1982

The Leger Galleries, London
Private Collection

Osborne Samuel, London

Nicholson’s work in Italy, although closely related to the central concerns of his art, is a special category in his oeuvre, which demonstrates his appreciation of Italian architecture and landscape. He visited Italy in 1950 and this was his first trip to the country since the end of the Second World War. Nicholson produced various drawings of some of his most favourite views throughout Italy – the regions of Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. Peter Khoroche has commented that, “laying no claim to a technical or historical knowledge of architecture, what interested him was the shape, the proportion, the lie of a building…Building, like objects, were a starting point only, naturally there was no point in mere imitation…Architecture in landscape offered an opportunity to combine his love of precise structure with his feeling of poetry and acute sensitivity to the spirit of place”.

Waddington Galleries, London

The sheet is tipped to a painted Masonite board at the upper left and right corners. 

Helen Sutherland, Cumberland

Gifted to Mrs Nicolette Gray

Her sale, Sotheby’s London, November 1975

Sale, Sotheby’s London, April 1989

Sale, Christie’s London, June 2006

Fine Art Society, London

Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above in 2008)

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Paintings and Drawings from the Private Collection of Miss Helen Sutherland, March – May 1962, no. 31

Painted circa 1932, Violin and Balalaika marks a highly important pivotal period of development for Nicholson when he was on the cusp of turning to the pure abstraction of his first white reliefs created only a year later in 1933. Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had travelled extensively to Paris and Northern Europe in 1932 and visited the studios of Mondrian, Brancusi and Arp as well as Picasso and Braque, whose cubist lessons in transforming three-dimensional form into the two dimensional space of analytical and synthetic cubism Nicholson readily absorbed into his own visual language. The confident yet stylised line which simplifies the two instruments to their most pared down form undoubtedly represents a climax of Nicholson’s early style consolidating the influences and lessons he had amassed throughout the previous decade.

Violin and Balalaika belongs to a series of related musical still lifes executed at the time including

1932 (violin and mandolin), illustrated fig. 78 in Lyton
1932 (still life – violin), illustrated front cover of Lewison
1933 (guitar), Tate Collection
1932/3 (musical instruments), Kettle’s Yard, illustrated fig. 1 below
1933 (still life with mandolin), illustrated fig. 41 in Lewison
1932 (violin and balalaika ii), the present work
1932 (guitar), 
1932 (head with guitar / Avignon)
1933 (guitar), Kettle’s Yard
1933 (fiddle and Spanish guitar)
1932 (still life with violin / violin and compass)
1933 (coin and musical instruments), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The curvilinear structure of each instrument clearly appealed to the artist’s sense of form and in particular, the pyramidal body of the balalaika, a Russian instrument with three strings whose circular void of the music box made a pleasing contrast to the vertical emphasis of the strings themselves. The sophisticated simplicity of each instrument is enhanced by their position facing each other which alludes to Nicholson’s series of double portraits of himself with Hepworth (fig.2) who he had begun sharing a studio with in London in Spring 1932, around the time the present work was painted.

The distinctive surface of Violin and Balalaika is also important. The underlying ground is clearly visible beneath the multi-layered paint surface and as such, draws attention to the physical nature of the canvas itself. Winifred Nicholson highlighted that it was Christopher Wood who introduced her and Ben to the technique of ‘painting on coverine…it dries fast, you can put it over old pics’ (W. Nicholson, Kit, unpublished memoir, Tate Gallery Archive 723.100, p.25). It created a firm painting ground which was visible beneath the painted image. In the present work, the textured paint surface takes on an additional three dimensional quality as the elements of each instrument have been literally incised into the paint, almost punctuating the canvas itself.

It is significant that the first owner of Violin and Balalaika was Helen Sutherland (1881 – 1966), one of Nicholson’s earliest and most enduring patrons who he had met on 5^th November 1925 through the artist Constance Lane. Both of her homes, Rock Hall in Northumberland and later Cockley Moor in Cumbria with renovations designed by Leslie Martin, became a refuge for Nicholson and many of his contemporaries. Sutherland was singularly adventurous in her support for the most avant-garde artists at the time acquiring works by Mondrian, Gabo, Hepworth and Moore long before they became recognised by a wider collecting community and crucially, she collected without hierarchy, as likely to support Brancusi as she was the Ashington group of artists who were former miners.