1948 (ICI SHED)

© Angela Verren Taunt 2015. All rights reserved, DACS

ICI SHED 1948 1948

Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982)

Details

Dimension
20 X 25 CM (IMAGE)
Media
DRYPOINT
Accession number
P2758

Summary

Nicholson produced a relatively small number of prints in comparison to his prodigious output of paintings, reliefs and drawings, and his use of printmaking falls into three distinct periods of activity: the linocuts of the late 1920s and 1930s, the drypoints of the late 1940s and 1950s, and the suite of etchings printed in Switzerland with the printer Francois Lafranca in the latter part of the 1960s. He did not use lithography or screenprinting and made only one woodcut, and it would appear that he never returned to a medium for a second time once the period of activity was over.

Nicholson (1894–1982) was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire and, apart from one term spent at the Slade, had no formal art education. He was one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century, and it was his move to St Ives in 1939 that pushed his investigation of abstraction: a distillation of the landscape expressed in line and blocks of subdued colour. Nicholson made few prints in comparison to his prodigious output of paintings and reliefs. ICI Shedbelongs to a group of six works showing scenes in and around Newlyn and St Ives. The artist has taken a high viewpoint and with the use of nothing more than an incised line depicts an industrial compound in the Cornish landscape: the wires of the pylon lead into the distance, the row of security lighting and looping scrolls of barbed wire enclose the site. ICI had set up a factory in Hayle to extract bromine from seawater, used as an anti-knock agent in petrol.

My Yard, British Council 2009

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Lithography

    Lithography means, literally, stone drawing. In addition to fine grain lithographic stones, metal plates can also be used for lithography. The method relies on the fact that grease repels water. An image is drawn in a greasy medium onto the stone or plate, which is then dampened with water. Greasy printing ink rolled onto that surface will adhere to the design but be repelled by the damp area. The inked image is transferred to the paper via a press. For large editions, the grease is chemically fixed to the stone, and gum arabic, which repels any further grease marks but does not repel water, is applied to the rest of the surface. For colour lithography the artist uses a separate stone or plate for each colour required.

  • Medium

    Refers to either the material used to create a work of art, craft or design, i.e. oil, bronze, earthenware, silk; or the technique employed i.e. collage, etching, carving. In painting the medium refers to the binder for the pigment, e.g. oil, egg, acrylic dispersion. The plural form is media.

  • Woodcut

    A relief print made by printing from the top surface of a plank of wood into which a design has been cut with gouges or knives. The cuts (which show up white in the print) are usually quite bold because of the texture and grain of the plank, whether hard or soft wood. This term is broadly used to cover any print from a wooden block.