Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson 1894-1982, English painter; son of Sir William Nicholson. Nicholson's geometric abstractions of landscapes and still lifes are discreetly colored and lyrically expressed. In works such as Relief (1939; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) Nicholson developed the purism of de Stijl with great elegance. His paintings are in many collections, including the museums of Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. He was married to the painter Winifred Dacre and later to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth .

Bibliography: See his Drawings, Paintings and Reliefs, 1911-1968 (1969); study by C. Harrison (1969, repr. 1972).

Nicholson, Ben (1894–1982) English painter, one of the champions of British abstract art. Influenced by cubism and Piet Mondrian, Nicholson developed a geometric abstract style that he expressed in austere carved and painted reliefs, such as White Relief (1935). He later produced a series of freely abstracted still-lifes and landscapes, before returning to reliefs in the 1960s. Both he and his second wife, Barbara Hepworth, were leading members of the St Ives School.

Nicholson, Ben (b Denham, Buckinghamshire, 10 Apr. 1894; d London, 6 Feb. 1982). British painter and maker of reliefs, one of his country's most distinguished pioneers of abstract art. From his father Sir William Nicholson he inherited a feeling for simple and fastidious still-lifes, which with landscapes made up the bulk of his early work. In 1921 he first saw Cubist paintings on a visit to Paris 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. 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 he 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, Mondrian's work in particular coming as a revelation to him. In 1933 he 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, 1935, Tate, London). He also did paintings in a similar intellectual vein but with a poetic refinement of colour that offsets their severity of composition (Painting, 1937, Tate). 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). In 1939 he and Hepworth moved to Cornwall, where they became the nucleus of the St Ives School. They divorced in 1951 and in 1958 Nicholson 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. He returned to England in 1971. His late work moved freely between abstraction and figuration and included large, free-standing reliefs, notably one in marble in the garden of Sutton Place, Surrey (1982).

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 her joy in colour and light. 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.’