The late 1940s and the 1950s represented a synthesizing of Nicholson’s artistic styles and influences of the proceeding years, culminating in some of his most significant works which secured his international reputation. aug 14-50 (2) : still life (linear) is exemplary of this distinctive visual outlook - we see the merging of landscape and still life, representation and abstraction.
In the 1920s Nicholson had been committed to landscape in a consciously naïve manner (see lot 3); this gave way to pure Abstraction in the 1930s – the present work, from 1950, demonstrates how he successfully resolved these two driving interests. Ever since encountering Cubism in the 1920s in Paris, it shaped his aesthetic outlook. As he remarked:
'Cubism once discovered could not be undiscovered, and so far from being that 'passing phase' so longed for by reactionaries it (and all that its discovery implied) has been absorbed into human experience as we know it today.'
In the present work we see the outline of glass, goblet, stem, handle (favoured motifs) traced and repeated upon one another as to nearly lose their meaning. These various and dynamic visual perspectives are accentuated further by the trace of a landscape above and beyond.
Nicholson was living and working at this t.mes in Carbis Bay, Cornwall (as inscribed on the reverse of the present work), where he had moved in 1939 at the outbreak of war. The suggestion of landscape remains subtle here, in other works its presence is more pronounced. Also distinctive to the present work is the yellow tone that washes through the centre of the work. One year previously, Nicholson had moved to a larger studio at Port.mes or Beach in which there was only a top lighting through a skylight. Dated to August 1950, perhaps Nicholson too hints at summer light flooding in.
The architect David Lewis, Nicholson's friend and neighbor at St. Ives, was also to emphasis the importance of the play of light in Nicholson’s new studio on his work of the period:
‘… through the skylights came the reflected light of sea and sky. The studio was white inside, and its whiteness plus the light from the sea made sharp colors incredibly intense. Around the walls were stacked canvases; and on a shelf were the bottles and glass goblets which appear in so many of his paintings...’
The overall effect is a work of subtle sophistication, the culmination of thirty years of exploration and experimentation. With this visual language, realized on a dramatic scale in major works of the period, such as Feb 28 – 53 (Tate), Nicholson was undoubtedly the pioneering British Modernist painter of his generation. This was recognized through the decade as his achievements saw him exhibit at the Festival of Britain in 1951, at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and win the Guggenheim International Painting prize for August 1956 (Val d’Orcia) and 1st prize for painting at the IV São Paulo Biennal a year later.