Nicola Wood: Art Since 1945

Art Since 1945 was first published in 1958 by Harry N. Abram Inc., New York.  It has texts and photographic plates by a group of artists; edited by Milton S. Fox.  Nicola has a hardbound, original edition.  Her remarks below summarise the impact the book had upon her.  They are copied from her Artist Statement that was sent to you.

Nicola says there was no particular artist nor work which influenced her.  She was attracted to abstract expressionism as a movement because of the creative freedom it gave her.

In my first year at the Royal College, the book Art Since 1945 was published.  It introduced me to abstract expressionism.  Abstraction gave me a new source for creativity.  I was not limited to colours and shapes of pre-existing objects.  I was free and inspired to express my reactions simply to colours and shapes I noticed.

When you consider Nicola as a young, emerging, postwar British artist, she is not unique among her contemporaries as to how the book and abstract expressionism influenced her.  Within the book’s art plates are numerous examples of abstract styles Nicola and other RCA classmates employed.   The influence of the book on Nicola as an artist has to be merged with other factors involving time and place.  First, it must be understood that Nicola’s artistic talent was recognised at all levels of her art education by her teachers in her earliest grade levels, through John Holden recruiting her to Manchester, and culminating on graduation from the RCA in 1960 with Sir Robin Darwin presenting her in the senior commons as that year’s Fulbright Scholar.  At a time when she was influenced by the book and abstract art, the Fulbright placed her in New York’s Greenwich Village which was an epicentre of abstract art and its offshoots such as pop and photorealism.  Her Bleeker Street studio was adjacent to Tom Wesselmann’s.  Tom and his wife Claire became her friends. Through the Wesselmanns she had unique access and exposure to art in galleries she visited and artists she met.  The influence of the book was enhanced by the scholarship’s bridge that Nicola crossed from London to New York then back again when she returned late in 1963 and opened her studio in Notting Hill Gate.  Nicola’s recognised talent and her direct exposure to the New York art scene in the early sixties are what make the book’s influence upon Nicola unique among her contemporaries.

I have copied a passage below from Art Since 1945, page 331.   It describes the real, first hand, direct stimuli Nicola experienced in New York which supported the influences in the book that attracted Nicola and her contemporaries to abstract expressionism.  In particular, note the reference to “creation.” because that is the process that Nicola says drew her to art (as stated in her Artist Statement).

The plastic vigour of American Abstract Expressionism stems from heightened consciousness of the act of creation.  It is an art of origins, young, intense, harsh, and new: its emotional force drives from the identification of an abstract means, of the painting process itself, with passion, with disquiet, with problems of existence and being.

The passage above describes the attraction of the movement to any young, British, postwar artist.  What makes the passage’s impact upon Nicola unique among young, British, postwar artists is that she experienced the movement first hand in America, not only second hand through the book and other media.

 

Photos (top): Wood at the RCA prior to her departure to New York on her Fulbright Scholarship.

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