Ben Nicholson was a British artist who stood at the origins of the Abstractionism in England. He was known for the strict geometric compositions including landscapes and still lifes, often made in form of reliefs.
Background
Ben Nicholson was born on April 10, 1894, in Denham, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. He was a son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, both painters. At an early age, Ben adopted his father’s manner of making simple but meticulous still lifes.
In fact, having many relatives related to art, Ben was exposed to it since his childhood as was his sister Nancy who became a famous artist, and his brother Christopher who chose the profession of an architect. Ben had one more brother named Anthony. The well-known artist's brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder were uncles of Nicholson’s maternal grandmother Barbara Pryde. One more painter in the family was Ben’s uncle, James Pryde.
Two years after Ben’s birth, the family relocated to London.
Education
Ben Nicholson received his elementary education at the Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School in London. Then, he pursued his formal studies at Gresham's School in Norfolk.
In 1910, Nicholson entered the Slade School of Fine Art. While at the institution, Nicholson got acquainted with Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth.
In search of his own way, Nicholson dropped the formal artistic training in 1911 and traveled around Europe in order to develop his painting skills. He sketched the architecture and painted landscapes.
The start of Ben Nicholson’s career can be counted from the drawing James Matthew Barrie used for a poster of his play ‘Peter Pan’ in 1904.
During the 1910s, the artist earned his living working in France, Italy, Portuguese Madeira. He was not admitted to the army at the outbreak of the First World War because of his asthma. To cure the illness, he went to New York City and then toured briefly the United States. The artist came back to the United Kingdom in 1918. The following year, Nicholson demonstrated his artworks at the group exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries in London.
Beginning in 1920, Ben Nicholson concentrated on realistic still lifes and landscapes made in a soft color palette. A year later, while in Paris, the painter discovered the art of cubism encountering the paintings by Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso. Nicholson was impressed by the style and began to incorporate its elements in his still lifes which became more and more abstract during the decade.
In 1922, Nicholson debuted with the solo exhibition held at the Adelphi Gallery in London. The first was followed by another one two years later at the Twenty-One Gallery.
Nicholson’s art of this period was characterized by the use of strict geometrical shapes such as rectangles and circles. So, the artist set up experiments with primitive style taking his inspiration from the naive art of Henri Rousseau and the early folk art of England. The interest to the style was heightened by landscapes and marine paintings of Alfred Wallis which Nicholson saw during his first trip to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1928. By the early 1930s, Ben Nicholson completely turned to abstract art.
The painter became fascinated with a new format of non-objective art called abstract relief sculpture. He developed the form into his so-called geometrical ‘white reliefs’, made from wood. The first one of such works composed of circles and straight lines, ‘White Relief, appeared in 1933. Four years later, along with the artist Naum Gabo and the architect Sir Leslie Martin, Nicholson co-edited Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. It was a notable monograph aimed to promote the movement of constructivism as well as other modern styles in the United Kingdom.
At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the artist left London and relocated to St Ives with his family. He took an active part at the artistic life of the community through various art societies, including St Ives Society of Artists, and supporting the younger generation of artists living there, among whom were Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost and John Wells. In 1949, along with his then wife Barbara Hepworth, Nicholson founded the Penwith Society of Arts. While in Cornwall, Nicholson came back to landscape and still life painting and added color in his wood reliefs.
The two subsequent decades provided the artist with international acclaim. In 1952, he participated at the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh which was followed by the Venice Biennale two years later. A couple of retrospectives of his art was organized at Tate Gallery in London and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Municipal Museum of Amsterdam) in 1955.
The artist had lived and worked in St Ives till 1958 when he moved to Castagnola, Switzerland.
The most important exhibitions of the 1960s included the retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Bern (Art Exposition Hall of Bern) in 1961, the Dallas Museum of Art in 1964 and the Documenta III exhibition in Kassel, Germany the same year.
In 1971, Nicholson came back to the United Kingdom. The last period of his life, he continued to exhibit in the country and abroad, including Basle and Zurich in Switzerland, Budapest in Hungary, Tokyo in China and Osaka in Japan.
The last retrospectives of his art while alive took place at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1978 and at the Waddington Galleries in London four years later.
Quotations:
"There is no need to concentrate; it becomes a part of living. I think that so far from being a limited expression, understood by a few, abstract art is a powerful, unlimited and universal language."
"The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point."
"'Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality."
"'Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea."
"Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny."
"I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking."
"I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else."
"The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul."
"Politics are beautiful. They enable a community to live collectively with one another. It's not about stabbing each other in the back; it's about enabling people to reach their dreams and pursue happiness."
Membership
Seven and Five Society
,
United Kingdom
1926
Abstraction-Creation
,
France
1933
Unit One
,
United Kingdom
1933
Saint Ives Society of Artists
,
United Kingdom
1943
Interests
Artists
Alfred Wallis, Pablo Picasso
Connections
Ben Nicholson was married three times.
His first wife became a painter Winifred Roberts on 5 November 1920 in London. The family produced three children. There were two sons named Jake and Andrew, and a daughter Kate who followed her parents’ steps and became a painter. Winifred and Ben divorced in 1938.
The same year, on November 17, Nicholson formed a family with another artist, Barbara Hepworth. Ben and Barbara had lived together for thirteen years and had triplets, named Sarah, Rachel and Simon.
Six years after the divorce with Barbara, Nicholson married for the third and last time to a photographer from Germany Felicitas Vogler. The couple had no children and broke up in 1971. The divorce followed six years later.