A Key Modernist Moment: Nash & Nicholson at Dymchurch.
“Unlike many of his contemporaries who had attracted attention before the war, Nicolson had probably never considered the possibility of an art that was anything but asocial. It is as much to this as to the ‘originality’ of his work that Nicholson owes his status as the paradigm modernist painter in recent English art history.” Charles Harrison.
There are moments in European painting when the interaction between two artists working alongside each other results in a defining moment for a movement, or indeed the artists themselves. One thinks of Monet working next to Renoir at La Grenouillière in 1869, and how their two contrasting treatment of the floating restaurant indicated stylistic variation and competing temperaments. In another country, and over fifty years later in 1923, another similar pairing was achieved when Ben Nicholson visited Paul Nash at his cottage at Dymchurch on the south coast where they both set up their easels and painted the shoreline. In this instance two artists were not exactly copying the same motif: Nash painted the view obliquely along the sea wall on the beach, using horizontals and diagonals to structure his composition (above). Nicholson, however, faced straight out to sea in the process painting both sky and ocean. As Charles Harrison says, this is an important moment for English modernism: “the works of the two may be used as instances of the two main avenues of development in English painting during the 1920s.”[1] Nash’s Dymchurch paintings draw on an established tradition of perspective with a vanishing point; whilist mood and emotion is drawn out through colour contrasts and different shading. What differentiates Nicholson’s Dymchurch campaign from Nash’s is the focus on surface, and the manipulation of shapes and colours “as a function of increasing that surface” (Harrison) which does not depend on perspective to structure it. Nicholson’s interest in a modernist “truth to materials” is thought to date from 1920 with such paintings as Cortivallo, Lugano which echoes late Cézanne landscapes in its composition, and in its light and colour, Italian primitives which Nicholson may have seen in the Louvre in Paris en route from Switzerland back to England. A photographic collection of works by Giotto, Uccello, Cézanne, D Rousseau, Matisse, Derain, Braque and Picasso was in the collection of his wife. According to Harrison this group of artists reflecting the early “pure” over later “sophisticated” Renaissance work, as well as the “primitivism” of Rousseau plus the post-impressionist style was compatible with the views of Roger Fry, though Bloomsbury were never to take any interest in Nicholson.[2] It was of no consequence to Nicholson; he would develop his own brand of modernism independently, painting alongside his wife who said that the Lugano work was where her husband “first struck oil.”
[1] Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939, 174.
[2] Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 176.
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