Ben Nicholson

British painter

• Born: April 10, 1894
• Birthplace: Denham, Buckinghamshire, England
• Died: February 6, 1982
• Place of death: London, England

Influenced by such continental innovators as Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Nicholson became the foremost exponent of abstract painting in twentieth century Great Britain.

Early Life

Ben Nicholson was the eldest of four children born to Sir William Nicholson and Mabel (née Pryde) Nicholson, both painters, as was his uncle, James Pryde. Nicholson at first attempted to resist the family tradition and sought to become a writer. After receiving his primary education at Heddon Court School (Hampstead) and the Gresham School (Holt), however, he decided to follow his natural inclinations and attended the Slade School of Art (London) in 1911. Although Nicholson completed only a single semester at the Slade School, he did produce his first oil painting there, a still life of a jug sitting on a table, and thereby launched a productive career that would continue into the 1980’s.

After leaving the Slade School, Nicholson continued his education in Europe, studying in Tours in 1911-1912 and Milan in 1912-1913. During this period, he found himself attracted to such painters as Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, but he was especially impressed by the cubist works of Pablo Picasso. His own paintings from this period remained rather traditional, consisting mainly of still lifes and romanticized landscapes, but the seeds of his future abstract work had been planted.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Nicholson volunteered for military service but was turned down for reasons of poor health. He spent the war years in England and married Winifred Dacre Roberts, a fellow writer and painter, in 1917. They took an extended honeymoon to Pasadena, California, and, on returning to England in 1918, split their time between homes in Switzerland, Cumberland (in northern England), and London. They were divorced in 1932.

The postwar years were a period of “fast and furious experimentation,” according to Nicholson. In his first one-man show, held at the Adelphi Gallery in London in 1922, his paintings, still mainly still lifes and landscapes, attempted to re-create the simplicity of British folk art and impressed viewers with their “brilliant, innocent coloring and lively surface variations.” Nicholson also included some portraits in this exhibition, but they failed to attract the same favorable attention as his other work.

Descriptions and photographs of Nicholson from this formative period depict a small, almost fragile man, once described as “a smaller and more delicate Picasso.” His hair, originally dark, turned white rather early in life and gave him a serious and distinguished demeanor. He did have a lighter side, however, and was noted by his friends and acquaintances for his good humor, his expertise at puns, and his skill at tennis and table tennis.

Life’s Work

Although Nicholson produced a few abstract paintings in the immediate postwar period, it was not until the early 1930’s that he began to devote himself entirely to this new area of art. Various influences determined this growing interest in abstract art. Primary among them was Nicholson’s exposure to the pioneering work of Picasso, Joan Miró, and especially Piet Mondrian. He met Mondrian for the first time in Paris in 1932, and this meeting permanently changed the direction of Nicholson’s work. The overwhelming simplicity and power of Mondrian’s geometric shapes had a tremendous impact on Nicholson and transformed his latent interest in abstraction into a lifelong mission. Another influence was the work of Barbara Hepworth, an abstract sculptor whom he took as his second wife in 1933. Her interest in expressing emotion through pure form can be observed in many of Nicholson’s later abstract paintings.

This new direction in Nicholson’s work first came to public attention at a one-man show held at the Lefevre Gallery (London) in October, 1933. The show demonstrated Nicholson’s obsession with absolute form and consisted of textile designs, collages, plaster canvases, figure drawings, and paintings composed of nothing more than a few apparently random lines or circles scattered on a blank surface. His best-known work from this show is 1933 (painting), composed of several free-floating red circles against a light background. Reaction to his radical departure from the mainstream of British art was mixed. Some condemned Nicholson’s work as superficial and a spatial disaster. Others, however, admired the simplicity and impression of silent power that his works conveyed and drew parallels between Nicholson’s clean and straightforward geometric shapes and the work of the best of the twentieth century’s architects and industrial designers.

In 1937, Nicholson helped found an artistic journal, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, to promote those qualities he was trying to express in his art. Coedited by Nicholson, Naum Gabo, and J. L. Martin, the first issue included articles by Mondrian, Charles-Édouard Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Lewis Mumford, Henry Moore, and Nicholson himself. Although the journal folded shortly thereafter, it did provide at least a temporary forum for the adherents of “Constructionism” (as abstraction was often termed) and marked Nicholson as the foremost advocate of that art form in England.

Nicholson lived in London with his second wife until 1940, when their marriage ended in divorce. He then moved to the coastal town of St. Ives in Cornwall and lived there until shortly before his death in 1982. He never remarried, but he did often enjoy the company of his six children: two sons and a daughter by Winifred Roberts and triplets (one son and two daughters) by Barbara Hepworth.

Although he had met with some critical resistance during his pioneering Lefevre Gallery show, Nicholson remained completely devoted to abstract art and, as time went on, he won over many of his former critics as well as the majority of the sophisticated art public. Beginning in the late 1930’s, many of his works were purchased by some of the most important art museums and galleries in the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, the Ottowa National Gallery of Canada, the Ohara Museum in Japan, and the National Gallery of New South Wales in Australia. Several of Nicholson’s paintings were included in the British exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in were chosen, and he also received prestigious commissions to create murals for the Festival of Britain(1951) and the new Time-Life Building in London (1952). In 1956, he was honored by being included in the “Masters of British Painting: 1800-1950” show put on by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Nicholson reached the peak of his career in the 1950’s. In addition to the honors and commissions mentioned above, he was also the recipient of numerous prizes and awards during this decade. These included first prize at the Carnegie’s Thirty-ninth International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1952; the Ulissi Award at the Venice Biennale in 1954; the Governor of Tokyo Award at the Third International Exhibition in Japan in 1955; the Grand Prix Award in the 1956 Fourth Mostra Internazionale di Bianco e Nero in Lugano, Switzerland; and first prize for non-Brazilian painters at the Fourth São Paulo Bienal in Brazil in 1957.

His most important achievement during this fruitful period, however, was an award of ten thousand dollars from the Guggenheim Foundation for the outstanding contemporary painting of 1955-1956. Entitled August 1956 , the painting consisted of a pattern of blue, gray, brown, and red geometric shapes and portrayed a subtle mood of tranquillity and peace. Some criticized the selection and claimed that it was not equal to Nicholson’s earlier works. They may have had a point, but the Guggenheim nevertheless represented recognition for Nicholson’s long devotion to abstract art and, in this sense, was richly deserved.

Nicholson’s productivity diminished dramatically in the 1960’s and 1970’s as he spent more and more time with his family, pursuing his hobbies of table tennis and golf, and enjoying the scenery of his beloved Cornwall. His health, never strong to begin with, began to fail in the 1970’s and, late in the decade, he moved back to London to be near increasingly necessary medical facilities. Nicholson died in that city on February 6, 1982, at the age of eighty-seven.

Significance

British artists never achieved the stature and renown of their French, Italian, German, and even American counterparts in the various schools of modern art that appeared during the twentieth century. In many ways, British art during this century seems somewhat derivative and unimaginative compared to the work of such continental and American innovators as Picasso, Miró, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky. Nicholson, however, represents an important exception to this generalization. Although continental abstractionists such as Miró and Mondrian had a strong impact on the direction of his painting after 1920, Nicholson filtered their influence through his unique personality to create original and exciting works that received international recognition.

One of Nicholson’s best paintings, Vertical Seconds (1953), illustrates this point very well. It is a large, rectangular canvas filled with various lines and geometric shapes. The influence of Mondrian, with his emphasis on the power of straight lines and rectangular relationships, is clear. Yet one would never mistake this painting for one by Mondrian. Demonstrating a beautiful sense of balance and proportion, the painting presents an airy, almost mystical, mood and gives the viewer the impression that he is looking at something distinctly British.

It was Nicholson’s subtle blending of continental influences and his own British artistic inheritance that gave his work its special flavor and its own importance. He may not have been at the same level as a Mondrian or a Miró, but he cannot be dismissed as merely being a less talented imitator. The best of his work exposed Great Britain to the potential and beauty of abstract art and provided an example for younger artists who were seeking a means of expression that transcended the confines of traditional British art without completely losing touch with it. In this important sense, Ben Nicholson represents a pivotal figure in the evolution of modern art in twentieth century Great Britain.

Bibliography

De Sausmarez, Maurice, ed. Ben Nicholson. London: Studio International, 1969. Although the text is meager, this book includes an outstanding series of color plates covering the entire span of Nicholson’s career.

Gaunt, William. A Concise History of English Painting. New York: Praeger, 1964. A very brief survey of British art from the Middle Ages to the 1960’s. Nicholson receives only a few paragraphs in this study, but this brief discussion does a good job of placing his work within the context of British artistic traditions.

Hodin, Josef Paul. Ben Nicholson: The Meaning of His Art. London: Alec Tiranti, 1957. A rather sophisticated, almost philosophical, discussion of what Nicholson was trying to achieve through his art. Hodin also includes an excellent section on Nicholson’s impact on younger generations of British artists.

Khoroche, Peter. Ben Nicholson: Drawings and Painted Reliefs. Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries, 2002. Examination of Nicholson’s artistic career, focusing on the drawings and painted reliefs he made between 1950 and 1975.

Nash, Steven A. “Ben Nicholson: An Historical Perspective.” In Ben Nicholson: Fifty Years of His Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Includes abundant prints from the various stages in his artistic evolution and a balanced assessment of his contribution to modern art in the twentieth century.

Rothenstein, John. Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1956. A fussy, eccentric analysis of modern art in Great Britain by the former director of the Tate Gallery in London. The chapter on Nicholson contains some good insights, but it is weakened by a long and rather pointless diatribe against the philosophy behind abstract art.

Soby, James T. Masters of English Painting, 1800-1950. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956. A catalog prepared to accompany the show of the same title that was presented by the Museum of Modern Art in 1956. Nicholson was one of many artists featured in this show, and Soby includes a concise and sympathetic analysis of Nicholson’s place in British art.

Summerson, John. Ben Nicholson. London: Penguin Books, 1948. Summerson was a close friend of Nicholson and an admirer of his work. This book is based on Nicholson’s correspondence with the author and provides an excellent portrayal of the former’s motivations, influences, and goals.