Ancient Wall 1962

Ancient Wall contains a warm, harmonious palette, symbolic designs, and stacked block-like shapes that form a dynamic visual field. Its point of departure was likely “the 300 BC walls of Naxos,” archaeological remains of ancient Greek civilization that Marion Nicoll toured while visiting Sicily in 1959. In April of that year she received confirmation of her first Canada Council grant to support her teaching and art practice. She spent the spring and summer in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and painted and drew almost every day. Nicoll finished Ancient Wall three years after her return to Calgary because she had sent her canvases home from Europe rolled, and some needed reworking. It marked the last of her European-inspired paintings, which also included Sicilia #1, 1959, Sicilia V: The House of Padrone, 1959, and Rome I: The Shape of the Night, 1960.

In summer 1962, American critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1944) visited Nicoll during his tour of the Canadian Prairies. A year later he included Ancient Wall in his article for Canadian Art magazine, where he identified “Nicoll as among the best painters in oil and watercolour to hail from Calgary.” Greenberg and Nicoll had met in New York in 1959 through Will Barnet (1911–2012) and Greenberg had given her his private phone number, but she never called him, concluding that “we are different people.” She took offense to his male-privileged commentary that her work showed “the helpful influence of Will Barnet.” Rather, she asserted that she was ready for the change made in New York and that influence and admiration of another artist’s work remain separate matters. Greenberg had ignored the visual force and context of production for Ancient Wall in Nicoll’s evolving practice. Nonetheless, his attention remained essential if Nicoll aspired to wider public recognition while circulating amid the male-genius imaginary of hard-edge painting, in which she was among the few women artists.

Ancient Wall was first exhibited in summer 1963 in the All Alberta Exhibition of Painting, and that year the Edmonton Art Gallery (now Art Gallery of Alberta) became one of the first public art galleries to acquire one of Nicoll’s paintings. It has continued to garner more attention in survey exhibitions of Alberta and Western Canada and was included in her 1975 and 2013 retrospective exhibitions.