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23 Drawings Throughout his life drawing was a crucial element of Nicholson's practice. Skilfully composed with fluent, intersecting lines, compositions such as March 1960 (S. Coffee pot), Sept. 1960 and Sculptured forms two, 1978 reveal why Nicholson's abstracted still lifes are considered amongst his finest works. Nicholson used the still life as a leitmotif through which to explore pure line and shape as he developed his own unique form of abstraction. Nicholson remained fascinated by the objects which had surrounded him during his childhood. He recalled with great fondness "the very beautiful striped and spotted jugs and mugs and goblets" collected by his father, the painter William Nicholson, from whom he learnt to paint traditional still lifes. Drawn with elegance and refinement, works such as this echo "the poetic spirit" which Ben Nicholson recognised in the compositions of his father. The subject of table-top still lifes also shows Nicholson's engagement with abstract movements across Europe. The revelation of Cubist painting came to Nicholson in Paris during the 1920s, when he first saw the work of Picasso and developed a close friendship with Braque. Under their influence, he assimilated into his own practice Cubist devices such as intersecting forms and flattened pictorial space through the blurring of conventional distinctions between foreground and background, which we find in each of these drawings. Nicholson joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1933, alongside Helion, Mondrian and Herbin, amongst others. The arrangement of planes in a rhythmic, geometric manner, as we find in the canvases of Herbin, points to Nicholson's continued interest in the interplay between abstraction and representation: "The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is both musical and architectural". Each of these characteristically modernist compositions reveals, above all, Nicholson's desire to create what he termed "a powerful, unlimited and universal language".