Naum Gabo (Briansk, Russia, 1890 Waterbury, USA, 1977) was given an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG) in 1972. He was followed by Leslie Martin (Manchester, United Kingdom, 1908-2000) in 1986. It was now time for Ben Nicholson (Denham, United Kingdom, 1894 - London, United Kingdom, 1982) in 1987. As mentioned by José Sommer Ribeiro, director of the Modern Art Centre (CAM), at the catalogue launch, this retrospective of the British artist's work had been desired by the FCG for a long time, to meet their goal of holding individual exhibitions for each of the three main founders of Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art, an avant-garde London-based journal with a modernist and international scope, the sole edition of which was published in 1937.
The exhibition was born out of a British Council initiative in cooperation with several international institutions, and it planned this journey for Ben Nicholson's work through Spain and Portugal.
The exhibition's travels were originally due to include only Spain: the Fundación Juan March (Madrid) and the Fundació Juan Miró (Barcelona). After the latter pulled out, the FCG suggested exhibiting the pieces on its premises and said that it could provide other support for them to come to Portugal (Letter from Henry Meyric Hughes to José Sommer Ribeiro, 8 Jul. 1986, Gulbenkian Archives, SEM 00360).
The initiative therefore took on an Iberian scope, with the total transport and insurance costs to be split equally between the FCG and the Fundación Juan March.
The exhibition was open in Madrid from 6 February to 26 March 1987 and opened at the FCG Temporary Exhibitions Gallery on 10 April of the same year. Sixty-four pieces were shown in Lisbon (66 in Madrid), dating from 1919 to 1981, providing a very broad chronological anthology of the artist's work using pieces ranging from drawing to painting, passing through modernist ideas that involved collage and textures and further including 18 of his characteristic geometric reliefs and an unexpected painted box.
His production from the 1930s and 1940s was particularly prevalent in the exhibition. It was, in fact, during the interwar period enlivened by the publication of Circle in 1937 that Ben Nicholson, then a member of the Abstraction-Création group, appeared to be most invested in reflecting, in a very particular way, on the aesthetic lines of constructivism and neo-plasticism.
The Ben Nicholson exhibition was definitely in important moment to spread the British avant-garde among the Iberian public and artistic world. It helped reinforce knowledge about what was, to a great extent, considered a modernism of the periphery (and the same could be said about what happened in Portugal and Spain as well). Raising awareness of that important historical context also benefited from the participation of Leslie Martin, who wrote one of the texts in the catalogue and attended the exhibition opening at the FCG and other events set up for the occasion.
The English architect had drawn up the project for the CAM building based on a previous design by Sommer Ribeiro, CAM director at the time. The relationship between the two architects was remembered by photographer Felicitas Vogler (1922-2006), Ben Nicholson's third and last wife, in a letter she wrote to Sommer Ribeiro around the exhibition in which she expressed her and Leslie Martin's (1908-1999) support for the exhibition. Martin even loaned one of the exhibition's most emblematic pieces: Argolis, 1959, a large 122x230 cm canvas reproduced on the exhibition poster and the cover of the catalogue.
Vogler was also present in Lisbon and, as suggested by Martin, brought with her some enlarged photographs of Ben Nicholson working in his studio (the documents available do not make it clear whether or not they were used, although the possibility to do so is also mentioned in a letter from Ann Elliott to Sommer Ribeiro (Letter from Ann Elliot to José Sommer Ribeiro, 1 Dec. 1987, Gulbenkian Archives, SEM 00360) and in correspondence Sommer Ribeiro received from Vogler in the weeks leading up to the opening (Letter from Felicitas Vogler to José Sommer Ribeiro, 15 Mar. 1987, Gulbenkian Archives, SEM 00360).
While Ben Nicholson's work was, at the time, relatively unknown in Portugal, Portugal was not as unknown to Nicholson or as absent from his work. The artist even dedicates some of his pieces to places in Portugal, including the relief 1971 (Óbidos, Portugal 3), 1971, which was included in the exhibition.
We must remember that very early on, FCG made a special commitment to modern British art. The clearest sign of that commitment took the form of the exhibition Arte Britânica do Século XX [British Art of the 20th Century] in 1962. That exhibition, which travelled through Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto, also arose from a partnership with the British Council. Even in the 1960s, a result of that continuing cooperation between the two institutions, the FCG began to gather its collection of 20th-century British art, a collection that currently has an important place in the international landscape.