Nicholson, Ben

Nicholson, Ben (1894–1982). British painter and maker of painted reliefs, one of the most distinguished pioneers of abstract art in Britain. He was born at Denham, Buckinghamshire, son of Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Nicholson, who was the sister of James Pryde and herself a painter. After studying briefly at the Slade School, 1910–11, he spent most of the next few years abroad for the sake of his health (he suffered from asthma) and did not devote himself seriously to art until 1920, when he married the painter Winifred Dacre, the first of his three wives. Nicholson's early work consisted mainly of simple and fastidious still-lifes, very much in the tradition of his father, and of landscapes (although he destroyed many experimental paintings). He first saw Cubist paintings on a visit to Paris in 1921 and in the following years his still-lifes showed a personal response to the standard Cubist repertoire of jugs and glasses, which he arranged as flat shapes on the picture plane. His most sophisticated work in this vein is Au Chat Botté (City Art Gallery, Manchester, 1932), a picture of a shop window that incorporates reflections in the glass of objects behind the artist. Nicholson was also influenced by the naive painter Alfred Wallis, whose work he discovered in 1928 and whose roughly textured surfaces he emulated.

From the early 1930s Nicholson turned to abstraction, partly because of the influence of Barbara Hepworth (they shared a studio from 1932 and married in 1938) and partly because of the impact of several visits he made to Paris at this time. He joined the Abstraction-Création association in 1933 and became friendly with several leading avant-garde artists there, Mondrian's work in particular coming as a revelation to him. Nicholson visited his studio in 1933, and later commented: ‘The paintings were entirely new to me and I did not understand them on this first visit (and indeed only partially understood them on my second visit a year later). They were merely, for me, part of the very lovely feeling generated by his thought in the room. I remember after this first visit sitting at a café table on the edge of a pavement almost touching all the traffic going in and out of the Gare Montparnasse, and sitting there for a very long time with an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose!’ In 1933 Nicholson made his first abstract relief and in 1934 his first strictly geometrical ‘white relief’ in painted wood, using only straight lines and circles. Such works were the most uncompromising examples of abstract art made by a British artist up to that date (White Relief, Tate Gallery, London, 1935). He also did paintings in a similar intellectual vein but marked by a poetic refinement of colour that offsets their severity of composition (Painting, Tate Gallery, 1937). By this time Nicholson was recognized as being at the forefront of the modern movement in England. He was a member of Unit One (1933), and one of the editors of Circle (1937), and under his chairmanship the Seven & Five Society organized the first allabstract exhibition to be held in England (1935). Simon Wilson describes him as ‘the only English painter to develop a pure abstract art of international quality between the two World Wars’ (Tate Gallery: An Illustrated Companion, 1990).

In 1939 Nicholson and Hepworth moved to Cornwall, where they became the nucleus of the St Ives School. Nicholson remained in St Ives until 1958, when he settled in Switzerland with his third wife, the Swiss photographer Felicitas Vogler. After the Second World War he won an international reputation, accompanied by many awards, among them first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1952 and the first Guggenheim International Painting Prize in 1957. In 1968 he was awarded the Order of Merit. He returned to England in 1971 and died in London. His late work moved freely between abstraction and figuration and included large, freestanding reliefs, notably one in marble in the garden of Sutton Place, Surrey (1982). ‘Nicholson devoted his life to his art, which he took with intense seriousness', but he was ‘something of a practical joker and a master of puns … He was a determined avoider of formality and convention in his life and in his art’ (DNB).

Nicholson's first wife, Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981), also known by her maiden name of Roberts and her mother's surname Dacre, was a painter of distinction. She is best known for her flower paintings, but she also did other subjects and abstracts, all her work showing a joy in light and colour. Even after they separated in 1931 (they divorced in 1938) she and Ben Nicholson took a keen interest in each other's work; he said ‘I learnt a great deal about colour from Winifred Nicholson and a great deal about form from Barbara Hepworth'. Kate Nicholson (1929– ), the daughter of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and Rachel Nicholson (1934– ), the daughter of Nicholson and Hepworth, are also painters. Another daughter of Nicholson and Hepworth married the art historian Alan Bowness.