WELCOME TO THE LAING ART GALLERY AND ARTICULATION

The Laing Art Gallery sits in the heart of Newcastle City Centre and opened its doors in 1904 thanks to the local merchant Alexander Laing who gifted the gallery to the people of Newcastle. Unusually, when the Laing Art Gallery first opened, it didn’t have a collection! Laing was confident that local people would support the Gallery and donate art.

In the early days the Gallery benefitted from a number of important gifts and bequests from prominent industrialists, public figures, art collectors, and artists. National galleries and museums continued to lend works, and, three years after opening its doors, the Laing began to acquire art. In 1907, the Gallery’s first give paintings were purchased.

Over the last 100 years, the Laing’s curators have continued to build the collection, and it is now a Designated Collection, recognised as nationally important by Arts Council England. The Laing Art Gallery’s exceptional collection focuses on but is not limited to British oil paintings, watercolours, ceramics, and silver and glassware, as well as modern and contemporary pieces of art. We also run temporary exhibition programmes which change every three months.

WELCOME TO THE LAING ART GALLERY!

Here is your chosen artwork:

1933 (design) by Ben Nicholson

Key Information:

By Ben Nicholson Produced in 1933 Medium: Oil and pencil on panel Dimensions: (unknown) Location: Laing Art Gallery Currently on display in Gallery D

PAINTING SUMMARY

1933 (design) is part of a series of works produced by Nicholson in the year of its title. The principle motif of these paintings is the female profile. The profile is taken from the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, an artist whom Nicholson worked closely with. He suggests hair using single lines In this work, there are two female and shapes. profiles side-by-side. The relationship between the more representational profile on the left with the abstract profile on the right suggests Nicholson’s interest

in the two styles of art. The circular shape encapsulating each profile is evocative of an ancient In some areas, the surface of the coin. painting has been scraped by Nicholson. However, there are also areas of flat and solid colour, such as the vibrant red. The contrasting colours and textures which

Nicholson used to create his work Before the 20th century, valuations of help to create a self-awareness of space. ‘high art’ had been based on accurate representations of the world. However, Nicholson’s painting does not seek to accurately represent the world like a photograph. Rather, his experiments with texture, three-dimensionality and abstraction draw the viewer’s

awareness to the fact that it is a painting. This idea was a key tenet of modernism, as famously defined by Clement Greenberg.

ARTIST PROFILE

Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982) was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire, and was the son of the artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He studied at the Slade School of Art, 1910-11. He then spent 1912 to 1914 in France and Italy, before living in the United States for a year. In 1920, he married the artist Winifred Roberts (see Evening at Boothby (1953) by Winifred Nicholson at the Laing Gallery). Over the next three years they divided their time between London, Cumberland and Switzerland.

In August 1928, he visited the Cornish town of St Ives for the first time. From the end of the nineteenth century, artists have flocked to this seaside town, primarily due to its light quality. Here, in 1931 he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. His ensuing relationship with Hepworth resulted in the breakdown of his marriage to Winifred. Following a divorce with Winifred in 1938, he married Hepworth shortly afterwards. After World War Two, Hepworth and Nicholson were instrumental in making St Ives a centre for modern and abstract developments in British art. However, the marriage ended with divorce in 1951.

Nicholson's earliest paintings were still lifes influenced by those of his father. He first exhibited in 1919, at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries in London. In the 1920s he began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by post-Impressionism and Cubism. He produced his first geometric and abstract reliefs in 1933. He associated with a group of like-minded artists and architects who wanted to apply 'constructivist' principles to public and private art, advocating mathematical precision, clean lines and an absence of ornament (i.e. decorations or embellishments used in art).

Frequent trips to Paris enabled Nicholson to be familiar with the studios of Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brancusi and Mondrian. The influence of Picasso can especially be identified within Nicholson’s work. The Cubist style pioneered by Picasso was significant to the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1930s.

Sources: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ben-nicholson-om-1702 https://www.richardgreen.com/artist/ben-nicholson/a/39 https://artuk.org/discover/artists/nicholson-ben-18941982

LABEL TEXT

Nicholson was a key figure in the development of British

abstract art in the 1930s and central to the group of Modernist artists in St Ives, Cornwall. He was for a time

married to artist Winifred Nicholson.

PROMPTS AND QUESTIONS

• Remember to write down your thoughts, ideas and feelings about the piece as you go.

• With the information you have, go find your chosen artwork and spend some time familiarising yourself with the piece.

• Is there anything that particularly stands out when viewing the artwork? Look at the use of colours, medium, subject matter.

• What is the subject matter? Explore the narrative behind the artwork. Use all the information you have been provided.

• Make a list of the key topic points you wish to discuss in your presentation.

Do any of the artist’s other works produce similar themes/emotions? How • do they compare/differ?

• Think of the historical context surrounding your chosen artist’s life and work.

• Make sure to prioritise which information you wish to include in your allotted presentation.

PRESENTATION SKILLS – THINGS TO REMEMBER

• Practice - Being familiar with your material is vital for delivering a good

presentation.

• Take notes of your classmates’ presentations – what have they done well and what parts could they improve upon? You do not have to share your evaluation, but think about how you can apply this to your own.

• Plan - Having a well-planned presentation ensures them to run more

smoothly, with mistakes less likely to happen. Practising with prompt cards could help you to maintain a good flow of speech and structure.

• Remember – Your classmates are probably just as nervous as you are.

• Breathe - A simple yet effective way to get through a presentation!

• Take pauses – Do not be afraid to take a pause in between sentences. This

helps ensure you are not speaking too quickly and makes sure you are breathing!

SIMILAR ARTWORKS

Ben Nicholson, 1933 (profile) (1933). Linocut print on paper, 60 x 45 cm. Tate, London.

Ben Nicholson, 1933 (St Rémy – self-portrait with Barbara Hepworth) (1933). Oil on canvas, 27.3 cm x 16.8 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London.