water | abstract art | Cubist | harbour | buildings | houses | boat | landscape
Associated Places:
Europe | United Kingdom | England | Cornwall | Saint Ives
Currently On View:
Not on view
Exhibition History:
Art in Focus : St Ives Abstraction (Yale Center for British Art, 2013-04-12 - 2013-09-29)Connections (Yale Center for British Art, 2011-05-26 - 2011-09-11)
Publications:
Sylviane Gold, In the Abstract, a Coastal Scene Materializes, A Review of 'Art in Focus: St. Ives Abstraction’ at Yale Center for British Art , New York Times, New York, July 14, 2013, metropolitan Section, p. 9, Yale Internet ResourceMatthew Hargraves, "Yale Center for British Art joins Art UK", ArtUK, 24 June 2019, https://artuk.org/discover/stories/yale-center-for-british-art-joins-art-ukNorbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson, Phaidon, London, 1993, p. 229, pl. 213, NJ18 N51 L95 1993 (YCBA)Jovan Nicholson, Kate Nicholson, Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, London, p. 14, NJ18.N514 N53 2019 (LC) Oversize (YCBA)Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 1, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)St Ives abstraction, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2013, cover, p. 21, V 2475 (YCBA)The Artist's Notebook, Artist, 40, December 1950, p. 96, Not available at Yale
Gallery Label:
Ben Nicholson lived near St. Ives in Cornwall from 1938 to 1958. During the Second World War he produced a number of small views through an open window. After experimenting with abstract white reliefs in the 1930s, Nicholson became more ambivalent about abstraction. In the late 1940s he wrote that “the kind of painting I find exciting is not necessarily representational or nonrepresentational, but musical and architectural.” This view of St. Ives depicts boats in the harbor glimpsed across the neighboring rooftops, while the foreground objects on the windowsill appear as a series of interlocking shapes. Gallery label for A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions (Yale Center for British Art, 2017-06-01 - 2017-08-13)