Nicholson at Tate St. Ives

I finally made it to Tate St. Ives to see the Ben Nicholson exhibition (probably the last large exhibition of his work for quite a while) and it was as good as I expected, if only because it was so beautifully free of people, which is really the only way to contemplate Nicholson's white reliefs. Derided as being "mere decoration" by his critics, the white reliefs can be said to be the very apotheosis of modernism: paintings, sculptures and architectural statements. However, they are not cold remote objects due to one fundamental reason: they are made by hand. Not only that, but they were (for the most part) made from one piece of board that was laboriously scraped into shape using an endless supply of razor blades, and it is this dedication and commitment that makes them strangely romantic objects, for all their white sterility.

Leaving aside the fact that Nicholson couldn't paint animals, and his Alfred Wallis ships now look a little twee, his still life paintings are a wonderful English cubism with domestic items arranged on a kitchen table, usually mugs, jugs and vases (left, 1954). Many critics point to Nicholson's mother's remark that when she heard "art talk" she would escape to scrub the kitchen table as an insipiration behind his "scrubbed" reliefs, but the same could be said of his still lifes: intense studies of domestic items on a well scrubbed kitchen table.

The later paintings in the exhibition reflect Nicholson's success, as they become larger and bolder, losing some of their understated intensity.