Landscape on a Tabletop

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Washington, D.C., a major retrospective for Ben Nicholson

Some artists so possess their landscape that the real place, visited for the first time, can look like a replica of their work. France is full of examples--the banks of the Seine seen as a Monet, the imprint of Cezanne on the red earth and twisted roots of the Midi, the Matisses latent in every curlicued balcony in Nice. In the same way, Cornwall is Ben Nicholson's territory. Insistently, and often without depicting landscape at all, his paintings have altered several generations of responses to that green ledge of land, shelved with granite and glittering in marine air, where the south of England finishes in the Atlantic.

Nicholson is coming up to his 85th birthday now. It is doubtful whether any other English artist has had a comparable effect on the development of abstract art. For several decades, his muted, delicately cut reliefs and abstracted images of still life and landscape formed the main link between English art and the cubist-constructivist tradition in Europe. Nicholson was born too late, and in the wrong country, to be one of the inventors of this tradition. Instead he became one of its most gifted, sensitive and celebrated propagators.

In the U.S., his work is well but incompletely known. For Americans, in fact, a full-scale retrospective show has long been needed to set in view the osmotic Nicholson exchange between the worlds of natural and abstract form. Now, for the first time, one has been mounted. Organized last fall by Chief Curator Steven Nash at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, it will be at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum until Feb. 18.

The son of an artist whose specialty also was still life, Nicholson grew up in a visually literate milieu. Because it was English, it was conservative. Ben's first real contact with modern art did not occur until the 1920s, when he saw a Picasso in Paris. "It was what seemed to me then completely abstract," he recalled later, "and in the center there was an absolutely miraculous green--very deep, very potent and very real."

That sense of reality in the midst of abstraction, of the painting as an object rather than an image, would stay with Nicholson. It is not much to the fore in his first tentative cubist paintings, but it is evident in the severely geometric white reliefs Nicholson did in the 1930s under the spell of constructivism and Mondrian, and it pervades his later work. The viewer is always aware of material gently asserting itself: how the tobacco-brown hardboard, rubbed and glazed with a pow dery white or blue that clings to its sur face like fog to a headland or lichen to a rock, has the reality of paper as well as the metaphoric function of paint. The work is seldom fully abstract however. The predilection for landscape that runs through English art surfaced again in Nicholson soon after 1939, when he went to live in Cornwall. The mild light of the peninsula, sometimes as crystalline as the Aegean, and its rolling, antique contours of moorland and coast, recur in hundreds of drawings and dozens of still-life and land scape paintings. Nicholson's favorite motif was that of the cubist Juan Gris: a view of objects on a table, vases, mugs, jugs, bowls, with a fragment of landscape seen through an open window behind, the two worlds -- exterior and interior -- compressed into a single overlapping image. Nothing is gratuitous, nothing fudged. The sharp pencil line -- Blake's "hard and wirey line of rectitude" -- engraves the surface with a kind of moral certainty. A work like June 4-52 (tableform), with the vestige of a dark, undulating horizon line assimilated into the play of the still life, is in its way a glimpse of paradise, a state where the conflicts of na ture and culture are resolved in har mony. The ambition to achieve such harmony has all but vanished from painting today. In Ben Nicholson's work it is preserved, modestly but tenaciously, as though under glass.

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