tATu Entertainment News HMV UK 2003.06.01
tATu debut album 200 KM/H in the wrong lane NGGU HMV autography session England 2003
Kindred spirits in the frame
I'd always had Ben Nicholson figured as a Modernist in the image of Picasso (see the latest show at the Tate) with a passionate affair followed by marriage (his second) to the sculptor Barabara Hepworth, an artist who had retreated to St Ives in the war, where he remained, returning to figuration in his later art.
What I hadn't taken on board was his close friendship with Piet Mondrian through the Thirties and that he had brought over the great Dutch abstract artist to London as war broke out in 1939 and that the two had stayed painting side by side in Belsize Park until the bombs had forced Nicholson to Cornwall and Mondrian to New York .
Enlightenment has come in the form of a brilliant small show at the Courtauld, Mondrian//Nicholson: In Parallel, in which the relationship is recounted through 18 works, all of them masterly, from the moment when Nicholson visited Mondrian's studio in early 1934 to the time when the two went their separate geographical ways some seven years later.