The artist betrays himself in the care he has lavished on minute adjustments to the painting's tonalities and textures. In fact, it is an involuntarily polite and sophisticated painting. Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, painted in that year, with its cartoon horse prancing on the strand, its child's-ideogram fishing boat and lighthouse, is Nicholson attempting to out-Wallis Wallis, to be as primitive as primitive can be. There is something touchingly pretentious about the young Nicholson's attempts to mimic the directness that he found and admired in the works of Le Douanier Rousseau and Alfred Wallis, the Cornish fisherman-turned-naive artist whom Nicholson and Christopher Wood came across in St Ives in 1928. It demonstrates that despite what the young Nicholson described as the need to 'break away from my family ptg (painting) tradition', Ben always remained William's son. In fact, the exhibition is an intriguing failure.
#TUCKED UP LIKE A KIPPER FREE#
'Ben Nicholson,' at the Tate Gallery in London, sets out to consecrate Nicholson junior as the Oedipal hero of modern English painting: the artist who liberated himself not just from the influence of Nicholson senior but from all that he stood for in terms of the stuffy, conservative, well-mannered world of early 20th-century English art the artist who cut loose and broke free from dun and dreary and parochial fatherland and who dared to step into the blinding white light of European modernism. They have however a certain depressing distinction. 'The pictures frightened me a good deal they were so abnormal and they seemed to me the work of an untrained eye, both in colour and form. 'Your paintings came at last with 80 something francs to pay on them,' Nicholson senior wrote sniffily in 1914 to Nicholson junior, then 18 years old, who had sent some examples of his work home from abroad. William Nicholson, elegant Edwardian painter of elegant Edwardian still lives, never did much like his son Ben's pictures.
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