Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson (1894 - 1982)

Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) was one of the few British modernist artists to win international recognition in his lifetime. His fame was underpinned in part by the white reliefs that he first made in February 1934, which were an original development—a picture tableau carved into and reimagined as a series of stacked planes, with those at lower depths revealed by removing sections of the upper planes. From an early age, beginning with his period in Lugano shortly after his marriage to the artist Winifred Roberts in 1920, his work was characterised by an ingenious combination of simplified forms and complex representation. His friendships with Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis were significant in the late twenties, and they helped Nicholson to develop a greater tension between the painting as a material object and as a pictorial image. In 1931 he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, with whom he had triplets in 1934, and through their relationship he discovered a deepening interest in scraping and scratching into his materials—a practice that eventually led him to begin carving wooden boards in shallow relief. Escaping London for St Ives shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, he made Cornwall his home and there began to reintroduce into his work a sense of place and, from 1945, his ‘still-life theme’, which he had learned at an early age from his father William Nicholson, a painter who collected elaborate ceramics and glassware.

For a sustained period between 1945 and 1958, Nicholson often made sophisticated cubistic still-life paintings—many of them on a large scale—and these won him critical recognition in the United States and Europe. He received the painting prize at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition in 1952, the inaugural Guggenheim International Award in 1956 and various prizes at the São Paulo Bienal in 1957 and the Venice Biennale in 1958. In 1958, Nicholson left England for Ticino, Switzerland, where he settled overlooking Lake Maggiore with his third wife the photographer Felicitas Vogler. His period in Switzerland, between 1958 and 1971, coincided with a return to carved relief, while his final period—a return to England in 1971—was marked by continued reflections on landscape and still life. His artistic achievements received official recognition and he was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1968.