BEN NICHOLSON (BRITISH 1894-1982)
VERONA, 1966
signed, inscribed Sadie & Leslie and dated March 66 in pencil (lower right), also inscribed Artist’s proof (Verona) (to reverse), etching on paper, blind-stamped (lower left), an artist's proof aside from the edition of 50: accompanied by a framed photograph of another work by Nicholson, annotated by the Artist (to reverse)
plate: 23cm x 11cm (9in x 4 ¼in): sheet; 35.6cm x 25.5cm (14in x 10in)
Gift of the Artist to Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight and thence by descent to the current owner.
Verona by Ben Nicholson and Design for a Mobile by Arthur Jackson were given by the artists to the architect Leslie Martin (1908-2000) and his wife, the designer Sadie Speight (1906-92). Martin and Speight played leading roles in twentieth-century architecture and design and as champions of progressive art. They met at the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture in the 1920s and married in 1935. The Martins first saw Nicholson’s work at the Unit One exhibition at the Major Gallery, London in April 1934. Shortly afterwards they visited Nicholson in the Hampstead studio he shared with Barbara Hepworth, thus beginning lifelong friendships. They also became friends with Hepworth’s cousin and Nicholson’s pupil, the artist and architect Arthur Jackson Hepworth. The group found their own professional interests closely affiliated and as a result the Martins joined the vanguard of modernism in England. Highlights of their relationships included Martin working with Nicholson and Naum Gabo as co-editors of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, published in 1937, for which Sadie Martin acted as Secretary. It included reproductions of two of Jackson’s paintings. Between 1937 and 1939 Jackson trained under Martin at Hull School of Architecture and worked as his assistant for a time before 1940. On Nicholson’s return from Switzerland to England in 1971, he spent three years living beside the Martins in Cambridgeshire. He died two weeks before an exhibition dedicated to Circle opened at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, for which Martin wrote the introduction, stating: ‘What has remained for me and others of my generation, is a confirmation of the belief that art, whether it is painting, sculpture or architecture can be one of the great constructive and unifying forces in our lives. That is what we intended Circle to express.’ (Leslie Martin, ‘Introduction’, ed. Jeremy Lewison, Circle: Constructive Art in Britain 1934-40, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 1982).