On Art

...He obviously loves to draw, and his pencil is as integral to his paintings as his brush...

...Arguments about form and/or content still rage, as if there were only one correct style...

...Although not an originator of the form, he did carry Synthetic Cubism to its most elegant conclusion...

...What one finds especially moving about them aside from their luminous, other-worldly quality, is his total commitment, his abiding good taste and a sense of his own pleasure in his work...

...He also uses color to delight and surprise: In one frosty painting, a passage of lemon yellow sings out from a sea of silver and white...

...It is therefore gratifying that Steven A. Nash, chief curator of the Albright-Knox Gallery of Buffalo, has organized a 50-year retrospective of the British octagenerian's work...

...We have seen de Kooning shuttle back and forth between the non-objective and the human figure...

...The shapes, the spaces between them and the shadows cast by the raised forms combined to make compositions that had a serene and classic beauty...

...In the '30s, as he was creating his white-on-white abstract reliefs, Nicholson also wrote articles that rejected the lofty mandate of the estheticians Roger Fry and Clive Bell...

...The look is ethereal...

...with a "why not...

...His control is always masterful: Subtle curves are played against straight edges, and the weight (the light and dark) varied to lend some areas the appearance of cutouts casting hairline shadows...

...Jackson Pollock, just before his death, gave up his drip and splash abstractions and returned to figurative work...

...A man like Nicholson, obviously intelligent, rational and controlled, who is not an innovator, anchors his esthetics in the tangible world...

...He was intrigued by Mondrian's pure abstraction, by Naum Gabo's av-ant garde constructions and by Kasi-mir Malevich's experiments with white squares on white canvas...

...His still lifes and landscapes of the '20s were personal, romantic, yet decidedly representational in style...

...A, *s for the vacillation between styles that we observe in Nicholson, it is neither the sign of an unfettered spirit nor an artist lacking conviction...

...The restless, aggressive spirit, like Picasso, will constantly break the rules, invent new approaches, respond to every "why...

...In addition, there are some bonuses for anyone who can make the trip to Brooklyn...

...The artist's own views on his work further complicate matters for those scholars with a hunger for categorization...

...These pieces gave me the impression that, in a very human and disarming way, Nicholson had simply dug up some very old efforts and toyed with them...

...For one thing, despite the decades covered here—from the '20s to the '70s—not a single work looks dated, or tired...

...It is the kind of show that makes painters anxious to get back to their studios to paint...

...It is a reasonable assumption that Nicholson's interest in art had its origins in his family: His father and uncle were painters, and his mother was an esthetic and sensitive woman...

...Art scholar Sir Herbert Read has pointed out, in reference to Nicholson, that geometry, after all, means earthly measurement—and that therefore Nicholson's abstractions may be more earthbound than they seem...

...The traveling exhibit is currently installed in the Brooklyn Museum's beautiful Blum Gallery...

...Consider his color, for instance...

...The Museum is among the few that still offers free admission, and there is an entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens directly off the parking lot...

...The notion of some reviewers that his white reliefs were inspired by the atmosphere in Cornwall is presumptuous, for we know he was executing these at least 10 years before he took up residence there...

...it confidently glides in rhythmic patterns, creating shape, over shape, over shape...

...1, on the other hand, get the feeling that while Nicholson paints with white kid gloves on, his color, texture and line are often excruciatingly sensitive, bordering on the sensual...

...Beyond these individual instances, the art world can be seen collectively shifting from one conviction to another and back again...

...In fact, during that period and through the '40s, Nicholson created his own white-on-white reliefs...

...He has certainly been influenced by his wife, Barbara Hepworth, by his friendship with Henry Moore—both British abstract sculptors—and by the French, Dutch and Russian Cubists and Abstractionists already mentioned...

...Nicholson's art is remarkable in several respects...

...Nicholson, however, used transparent veils of grays, browns and umbers, and washed these over with highlights of white...

...These were arrangements of squares, rectangles and circles cut out of thin white board, mounted in overlapping planes on a white ground...

...Apropos of these two men, who believed that art should give up all resemblance to nature in favor of pure abstract form —a "visual music"—Nicholson wrote: "However non-figurative a painting may appear to be, it has its source in nature...

...Inspirational" is a much overused word, but in the case of this exhibition, it is entirely appropriate...

...What factors, then, account for this artist's evolution...

...Following the lead of Picasso and Braque, Nicholson was in the early '30s attracted to Synthetic Cubism, composing arrangements of flat shapes abstracted from landscapes, architecture and common objects...

...His geometric abstraction is always based on nature...

...In the mid-'30s, the painter joined the Association of Abstract Artists in Paris...

...He studied art briefly at the Slade School in London, but he is essentially self-taught...

...His gossamer-thin line never hesitates...

...Today, it seems from some of his recent efforts on display at the exhibit, Nicholson has rather sentimentally returned to fusing romantic little landscape paintings with Cubist-style passages...

...Those words are, of course, hard to reconcile with the squares and circles he was producing at the time...

...through May 13...

...Nicholson's paintings are well done and do communicate...

...Most Cubists worked in closely related impasto grays, browns and earth tones to keep the shapes of objects flattened against each other and the picture plane...

...So one can enjoy indoor and outdoor pleasures on the same trip...

...His skill and sensitivity enable him to carry the adopted form to a point far beyond the capacities of the innovators...

...Jim Dine, after his brief flirtation with Neo-Dada and Pop Art, has resumed a naturalistic representational mode...

...Every artistic expression offers its own pleasures, as long as it is well done and communicates...

...The compulsive purist, like Mondrian, will pursue a single form, improving and refining it to the point of exhaustion...

...Nicholson is, in short, a very complex painter, subject to many alternating influences...

...Indeed, there is a clarity and immediacy—a rain-washed freshness—in all the paintings, drawings and reliefs...

...Another Nicholson idiom is his ubiquitous pencil line...

...Nicholson's singular way with color and line provide the two distinguishing characteristics of his art: a seeming luminosity and a sense of tloating forms...

...The resulting look is often dense, murky and airless...

...And he continued working in this mode even when living in Paris and Switzerland...

...In the '50s, he went back to Cubism, and in the next decade he worked color and texture into his relief constructions...

...Yet ultimately, I believe, the source of every artist's form is psychological...

...One historian, for example, has ascribed Nicholson's "genteel, cool, aloof, thin-blooded" art to the typical British character...

...Rather, it is an expression of a problem common to all artists who live long enough...

...This is a particular achievement, considering that Nicholson is neither an iconoclast nor an innovator...

...That makes him difficult to pigeonhole—to the consternation of those intent on pinning down an artist's sources, his particular bent...