- Ben Nicholson
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Ben Nicholson 
Portrait of Ben Nicholson by Mabel Pryde, circa 1910-1914Birth name Benjamin Lauder Nicholson Born 12 April 1894
Eight Bells, Denham, Buckinghamshire, EnglandDied 6 February 1982 (aged 87)
London, EnglandNationality British Field Painting Training The Slade Awards OM Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was a British painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscape and still-life.
Contents
Background and Training
Born on 10 April 1894 in Denham, Buckinghamshire, Nicholson was the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and the brother of artist Nancy Nicholson, architect Christopher Nicholson and Anthony Nicholson. The family moved to London in 1896; and Nicholson was educated at Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School, Seaford, Heddon Court, Hampstead and then as a boarder at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. He trained as an artist in London at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1910–1914, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, and Edward Wadsworth.
Nicholson was married three times.
His first marriage was to Winifred Roberts which took place on 5 November 1920 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London. Nicholson and Winifred had three children, a son Jake in June 1927, a daughter Kate in July 1929 (who later became an artist herself) and a son Andrew in September 1931. They were divorced in 1938.
His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. Nicholson and Hepworth had triplets, two daughters Sarah and Rachel and a son Simon in 1934. They were divorced in 1951.
The third and final marriage was to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer. They married July 1957 and divorced 1977.
Life and works
His first notable work was following a meeting with the playwright J. M. Barrie on holiday in Rustington, Sussex in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Barrie used a drawing by Nicholson as the base for a poster for the 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 travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other American cities, returning to Britain in 1918. Before he returns, Nicholson's mother dies in July of influenza and his brother Anthony Nicholson is 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 chair of the Seven and Five Society.
In London, Nicholson met the 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 was to influence 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 his fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he met the fisherman and painter, Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933 he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which contained only right angles and circles. 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 the Nicholson Wall, a mural he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. In 1943 he joined the St. Ives Society of Artists. A retrospective exhibition of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery in London in 1955.
Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 and moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968 he received the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971 he separated from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977 they divorced.
Nicholson died in London on 6 February 1982, and was cremated at Golders Green cemetery. His ashes were scattered over Golders Green Cemetery in the absence of instructions from his family, so there is no grave.
Some of Nicholson's works can be seen at the Tate St Ives gallery, Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge, and The Hepworth Wakefield.
References
- List of works in Museums and Public Art Galleries
- Ben Nicholson at the Tate Collection
- Detailed timeline of life at Britain Unlimited
- Ben Nicholson: Razor Edge (1985 film)
- Read Herbert, Ben Nicholson:Paintings,Reliefs,Drawings London 1948
- Norbert Lynton, Ben Nicholson (2001, with 250 colour plates, ISBN 0-7148-2813-0)
External links
Categories:- Modern painters
- English painters
- St Ives artists
- Members of the Order of Merit
- 1894 births
- 1982 deaths
- Old Greshamians
- People from Denham
- Alumni of the Slade School of Art
- Nicholson arts family
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