ABSTRACT
When in September 1939 Lanyon became a pupil of Ben Nicholson both artists were in some sense confronting a tabula rasa: Lanyon was suffering a breakdown in which he could envisage nothing but a blank, white board,3
while Nicholson had undertaken to teach an almost unknown pupil. Several of Lanyon's still-life drawings, made in small sketchbooks,4 show that he was tentatively exploring the overlapping and transparency of contiguous objects that are familiar from Nicholson's own, more resolved paintings. A small but arresting untitled crayon drawing (1939; Figure 4) is presented with framing and colour as though it had reached some conclusion on the dialectic between vision and imagination.5 On the right is a table, its top covered with various domestic objects. On the left an abstracted version of the same table-top is presented partly in full face and partly in plan. The two versions are joined, if somewhat hesitantly, by a common line that demarcates both the table leg and the enclosure of the left-hand image. Both its abstraction and its bright colour indicate that this is the dominant and most resolved part of the drawing: the final version of the still life. The sheet encapsulates a dichotomy between two kinds of imagery that Lanyon was to explore intermittently for the next decade, notably in the paired paintings of the 'Generation' series.6 Practising neither the rigorous abstraction of Gabo or of Nicholson's white reliefs nor the equally prescriptive realism of the Euston Road School, he was sufficiently receptive and flexible to adapt both models for his own purposes. The untitled 1939 drawing is probably the first work in which it is possible to watch this adaptive process unfold.
