BEN NICHOLSON 'CHASING OUT SOMETHING ALIVE' DRAWINGS AND PAINTED RELIEFS 1950-75
![AUGUST 1964 (RACCIANO)](http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/media/w540h540/collection/P821.jpg)
© Angela Verren Taunt 2015. All rights reserved, DACS
AUGUST 1964 (RACCIANO) 1964
Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982)
Details
- Dimension
- 137.8 X 79.4 CM
- Media
- OIL ON CARVED BOARD
- Accession number
- P821
Summary
Many of Nicholson’s late reliefs have place names in their titles. In some the reference between relief and place name is clear, in others the allusion is less obvious. The artist added the titles only after completing the works and the connexion between the two was always highly personal, and even at times frivolous. This work is not a representation of the landscape, but rather an evocation of an experience or awareness of it described in colour, form and texture.
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Glossary
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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.