Essay by Norbert Lynton, 80 pages, 66 colour illustrations. “When, sense prevailing, a future generation redraws the map of modern art in terms not of stated aims or stylistic manoeuvres but of the underlying character of the work produced, there will have to be an area allocated to what I can only describe as the art of joy. The word occasions embarrassment. We associate art with sterner aims, with revolution, diatribe and probing the limits of aesthetic endurance, and much has been achieved in pursuit of these goals even if, as goals, they are insufficient and often illusory. Everything else stands charged with escapism, even though it was the profoundest revolutionary of them all, William Blake, who wrote that 'he who kisses the Joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity's sunrise'. In our own century it takes a Brancusi, far from home and enrolled by the art world as a kind of saint and soothsayer, to say it is pure joy that I give you'. Matisse, more circumspect and much further from mysticism, dared to speak of offering us a good armchair; even that modest formulation is likely to make us nervous. Mondrian, another careful man, preferred to insist on his avoidance of the tragic, by which he meant the superficial and inconstant, whilst using his infinitely expressive idiom for statements of ever-growing confidence and optimism. Braque spoke of poetry and of harmonious relationships.” – from Norbert Lynton’s introduction
Title: Ben Nicholson: Recent Works
Authors: Norbert Lynton
Publisher: Waddington Galleries, London
Publication date: 1980
Language: English
Format: softcover with original acetate cover
Pages: 80pp.
Images: 66 colour illustrations
Condition: Loss to the top left corner of the front panel of the acetate cover. Otherwise fine and unmarked
Stock Number: RB05703 255
Essay by Norbert Lynton, 80 pages, 66 colour illustrations. “When, sense prevailing, a future generation redraws the map of modern art in terms not of stated aims or stylistic manoeuvres but of the underlying character of the work produced, there will have to be an area allocated to what I can only describe as the art of joy. The word occasions embarrassment. We associate art with sterner aims, with revolution, diatribe and probing the limits of aesthetic endurance, and much has been achieved in pursuit of these goals even if, as goals, they are insufficient and often illusory. Everything else stands charged with escapism, even though it was the profoundest revolutionary of them all, William Blake, who wrote that 'he who kisses the Joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity's sunrise'. In our own century it takes a Brancusi, far from home and enrolled by the art world as a kind of saint and soothsayer, to say it is pure joy that I give you'. Matisse, more circumspect and much further from mysticism, dared to speak of offering us a good armchair; even that modest formulation is likely to make us nervous. Mondrian, another careful man, preferred to insist on his avoidance of the tragic, by which he meant the superficial and inconstant, whilst using his infinitely expressive idiom for statements of ever-growing confidence and optimism. Braque spoke of poetry and of harmonious relationships.” – from Norbert Lynton’s introduction
Title: Ben Nicholson: Recent Works
Authors: Norbert Lynton
Publisher: Waddington Galleries, London
Publication date: 1980
Language: English
Format: softcover with original acetate cover
Pages: 80pp.
Images: 66 colour illustrations
Condition: Loss to the top left corner of the front panel of the acetate cover. Otherwise fine and unmarked
Stock Number: RB05703 255
