Ben Nicholson
gigatos | February 18, 2022
Summary
Ben Nicholson (April 10, 1894 – February 6, 1982). English painter and sculptor born in Denham, Buckinghamshire. His father, Sir William Nicholson, was a famous portrait painter, poster artist and sculptor.
Ben Nicholson son of painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, was the brother of artist Nancy Nicholson, architect Christopher Nicholson and Anthony Nicholson. His maternal grandmother Barbara Pryde (née Lauder) was the niece of famous artist brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. The family moved to London in 1896. Nicholson was educated at Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School, Seaford, at Heddon Court, Hampstead and then as a boarder at Gresham School, Holt, Norfolk.
He trained as an artist in London at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1910 and 1911, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth. According to Nash, with whom he formed a close friendship, Nicholson spent more time during his year at Slade playing billiards than painting or drawing, as the abstract formality of the green mat and the constantly changing relationships of the balls were, he later claimed, of more appeal to his aesthetic sense.
Nicholson was married three times. His first marriage was to painter Winifred Roberts; it took place on November 5, 1920 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London. Nicholson and Winifred had three children: a son, Jake, in June 1927; a daughter, Kate (and a son, Andrew, in September 1931. They divorced in 1938. His second marriage was to artist Barbara Hepworth on November 17, 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. Nicholson and Hepworth had triplets, two daughters, Sarah and Rachel, and a son, Simon, in 1934. They divorced in 1951. The third and final marriage was to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer. They were married in July 1957 and divorced in 1977.
His first notable work followed a meeting with playwright JM Barrie on vacation in Rustington, Sussex, in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Barrie used a drawing by Nicholson as the basis for a poster for his play Peter Pan; his father William designed some of the sets and costumes.
Nicholson was exempted from World War I military service due to asthma. He traveled to New York in 1917 for a tonsil operation, then visited other U.S. cities, returning to Britain in 1918. Before his return, Nicholson”s mother died in July of the Spanish flu and his brother Anthony Nicholson was killed in action.
From 1920 to 1933 he was married to the painter Winifred Nicholson and lived in London. After Nicholson”s first exhibition of figurative works in London in 1922, his work began to be influenced by synthetic cubism and later by the primitive style of Rousseau. In 1926 he became president of the Seven and Five Society.
In London, Nicholson met sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Moore. On visits to Paris he met Mondrian, whose work in the Neoplastic style influenced him to take him in an abstract direction, and Picasso, whose Cubism would also find its way into his work. His gift, however, was the ability to incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognizably his own. He first visited St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1928 with fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he met fisherman and painter Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933 he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. He then produced a series of bas-reliefs of elementary geometric forms painted in white or shades of gray, such as White Relief (1935, Tate Gallery, London) and Painted Relief (1939, Museum of Modern Art, New York).
In 1937 he was one of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on Constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public, as shown by Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for Sutton Place garden in Guildford, Surrey. Nicholson moved to St Ives in 1939 and lived in Trezion, Salubrious Place, for 19 years. In 1943 he joined the St Ives Society of Artists.
He won the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1952 and in 1955 a retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London. In 1956 he won the first Guggenheim International Painting Prize and in 1957 the International Painting Prize at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial.
Nicholson married photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968 he received the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971 she separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 they divorced.
Nicholson”s last home was at Pilgrim”s Lane, Hampstead. He died there on February 6, 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on February 12, 1982.
Some of Nicholson”s work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Tate St Ives, the Kettle Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge, the Hepworth Wakefield, and the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney. On November 1, 2011, an auction record for this artist of $1,650,500 was set at Christie”s in New York for September ”53 (Balearic), an oil and pencil on canvas. His painting Fiddle and Spanish Guitar, in oil and gravel on masonite, was sold for €3,313,000 by Christie”s in Paris on September 27, 2012.
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