Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson was a painter and sculptor known for his abstract compositions, and widely hailed as the pioneer of Modernism in 1930s Britain.

Influenced by Cubism and Constructivism, Nicholson cultivated a style characterised by clean lines, geometry and — in his words — a ‘musical’ relationship between form, tone and colour.

He was a member of the Seven and Five Abstract Group; the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group; Unit One — the group formed by Paul Nash in 1933 to promote modern art, architecture and design in Britain — an editor of the Constructivist publication Circle (1937) and, with his second wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, the nucleus of the St Ives School.

Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire in 1894, the eldest child of the Edwardian artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He met Nash at the Slade in 1910 but left after a term to pursue painting on his own terms, in France, Italy, Madeira and California.

In 1920 he married the artist Winifred Roberts, living between Lugano, Paris, London and Cumberland. His work then consisted of simple still lifes and landscapes, but in 1921 he encountered Cubism and took to depicting jugs, glasses and so on as flat shapes on the picture plane — July 25-47 (still life — Odyssey 2), was sold at Christie’s in 2021. Nicholson made his first properly abstract painting in 1924 and had his first solo show in London the same year.

In 1928, he and artist Christopher Wood ‘discovered’ Alfred Wallis in St Ives. To Nicholson the retired fisherman’s paintings on scraps of cardboard and wood embodied the authentic spirit of Modernism. He exhibited some in London, after which owning a Wallis marked you out as one of an elite club.

In 1931, Nicholson's relationship with Hepworth caused the breakdown of his marriage. He and Hepworth worked in close association and their shared Hampstead studio became the centre of the British abstract art movement.

Visits to Paris between 1933 and 1935 put them in contact with Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuşi, Jean (Hans) Arp, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. Typical of this period are Nicholson’s low reliefs of whitewashed circles and rectangles, such as White Relief(1936), which sold at Christie’s for £1,842,000 in 2022.

On the brink of World War II, Nicholson and Hepworth decamped to St Ives, where the Cornish landscape became a major influence. At the request of his dealer, Nicholson returned to landscapes. War had made British landscape paintings particularly popular, but Nicholson set to it in the only way he could, playing fast and loose with rules. In 1945 (St Ives), for example — sold by Christie’s in 2021 for £225,000 — with a Cubist sense of spatial depth.

In 1951, he and Hepworth divorced, but both remained in Cornwall. Six years later Nicholson met and married the German photographer Felicitas Vogler. In 1954, he represented Britain at Venice Biennale (with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud) and won the first Guggenheim International painting prize in 1956. In 1968, he received the Order of Merit. He died in 1982, aged 87.