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Feb 28-53 (Circle and Cast Shadow), 1953 Signed 'Ben Nicholson', titled and dated, on the reverse Oil on canvas laid down on board 21.9 x 16.8 cm (8 ⅝ x 6 ⅝ in) Provenance Peter Gimpel, by June 1954 Marcel Mabille, Rhôde Saint Genèse, by March 1955, then by descent Richard Green, London, Private collection, London, 2003, acquired from the above Richard Green, London Private Collection, London Osborne Samuel, London Exhibited Venice, British Pavilion, XXVII Biennale Internazionale d'Arte: Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, June – September 1954, no.22 Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Ben Nicholson, November 1954 – January 1955, no.40, this exhibition travelled to Paris, Musée National D'art Moderne, January – February 1955, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, March 1955, Zürich, Kunsthaus, April – May 1955 Literature Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson, Work since 1947, London, 1956, vol.II, no.77, illus. B E N N I C H O L S O N ( 1 8 9 4 - 1 9 8 2 ) 'I think there is no doubt now that my show has 'stolen the Biennale' – I knew it would go down well with the Italians & French, but I did not realise there would be such a forcible & instantaneous enthusiasm with the other nationalities too […] I never met so many Museum Directors & art critics in my life! The USA (MOMA) are wanting to buy a large work […] so is the ditto of Rome – indeed the future demands for work for exhibitions are going to be so great I shall need many good work spells.' Letter to Barbara Hepworth, Pensione Conte Castello – Venezia / June 18 [1954] Feb 28-53 (circle and cast shadow) was among those works on display in Ben Nicholson's celebrated exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1954. It would also be included in the subsequent tour that visited major cities across Europe throughout the following year. For the artist this was a period of considerable artistic achievement and critical success, with regular exhibitions taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout the decade Nicholson was the recipient of a string of notable awards, among them The Carnegie Prize (Pittsburgh, 1952), the Ulisse Award (Venice, 1954), the Guggenheim International Painting Prize, (New York, 1956) and the International Prize for Painting (São Paulo Art Biennial, 1957). Nicholson was very much a British artist with an international reputation. At the time of painting Feb 28-53 (circle and cast shadow), Nicholson was working at No. 5 Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, which he had begun to rent in 1949. Following a period in which his working space had been somewhat limited, the larger Porthmeor studio enabled him to take on a number of important commissions, including murals for the Royal Festival Hall (1951) and the London Time Life Building (1952). The size of the studio also made it possible for the artist to work on a range of paintings at any one time. Nicholson had always felt that his art had benefitted from long periods of intense focus, during which his ideas could unfold and become more fully formed. As he would note in a letter in 1955, "one cannot just make a ptg, one has to live ptg – & each one grows out of another, & something special – a discovery – can emerge out of a whole sustained working spell". It is interesting to note that at the time he was painting Feb 28-53 (circle and cast shadow), Nicholson was also working on two other significant pictures. The first of these was the large canvas Feb 25-53 (contrapuntal), which was also to be included in the Venice Biennale exhibition, by which time it had been purchased by the British Council. The second painting, Feb 28-53 (vertical seconds), completed on the same day as Feb 28-53 (circle and cast shadow), was acquired by the Tate following Nicholson's first major retrospective at the gallery in 1955. The close proximity of these paintings not only demonstrates Nicholson's commitment to exploring his ideas across a range of different sized canvases and boards, but also the manner in which the artist would work in parallel on both abstract and still life paintings. The extent to which he wished to avoid the compartmentalisation of his work had been set out by the artist in his 1948 Lund Humphries monograph: '[…] the kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is both musical and architectural, where the architectural construction is used to express a 'musical' relationship between form, tone and colour and whether this 54

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