Ben Nicholson, O.M. (1894-1982)

‘His drawings, too, have evolved in the direction of an ever-greater simplicity. In drawing still-life he has remained largely faithful to the subjects that are among his earliest and most vivid memories: the “very beautiful striped and spotted jugs and mugs and goblets and octagonal and hexagonal glass objects” which his father had collected. (…) Later, the individual object exists merely as an idea, or a recollection, of the noble form; and the point of the drawing is the pictorial idea—the meaningful curvings and intersections which relate not to a particular “beautiful” jug, but to every jug that has ever existed, and to the stresses and balances implicit in their construction and mutual relationships’.
(John Russell, preface to exh. cat. Ben Nicholson, London, April - May 1963, p. 10.)