Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire, to artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He was a student at the Slade School of Art from 1910 to 1911 and during his formative years travelled extensively to France and Italy (1912-14) and the United States (1917-18). In 1920, Nicholson married fellow-artist Winifred Roberts. The couple spent winters in Lugano, Switzerland, and otherwise divided their time between London and Cumberland. In London, Nicholson exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and Grafton Galleries, with his first one-man show held at the Twenty-one Gallery, London in 1924. Nicholson’s relationship with sculptor Barbara Hepworth from 1931 led to the end of his first marriage. He and Hepworth shared a studio in Hampstead nearby to the critic Herbert Read and were married in 1938.

Nicholson’s artistic style evolved significantly throughout his career. His early works were still lifes, influenced by his father. In the 1920s, he began creating figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Cubism. In 1927, he developed a consciously naïve landscape style, influenced by his encounter with Alfred Wallis’s art, and encouraged by his friend, the artist Christopher Wood. By 1933, Nicholson was producing his first geometric and abstract reliefs, developing the highly abstract style for which he is most famous. He was a member of the Seven and Five Society from 1924 to 1935, steering the group towards a focus on non-figurative art. He also exhibited with the short-lived ‘Unit One’ group, founded by Paul Nash in 1933. Alongside Hepworth, Nicholson was one of the few English artists to become involved with continental groupings such as ‘Abstraction-Création’. During this period he travelled to Paris often, visiting the studios of Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brâncuși and Mondrian. In 1937, Nicholson co-edited the publication Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art with Naum Gabo, Leslie Martin, Barbara Hepworth and Sadie Speight, aligning his work with artists and architects advocating for international ‘constructivist’ principles in art.

Between 1939 and 1958, Nicolson lived in St. Ives in Cornwall, where other artists and critics had moved during the Second World War, including Naum Gabo and Adrian Stokes. After the War, Nicholson’s work became better known through British Council tours. He won first prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1952, the Guggenheim International painting prize in 1956, and the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1957. Major retrospectives of his work were held at venues such as the Venice Biennale and Tate Gallery (1954-1955), Kunsthalle in Berne (1961), Museum of Fine Arts in Dallas (1964) and in 1968, he received the prestigious Order of Merit. Nicholson was married Felicitas Vogler (1957-77) and in 1957 moved to Switzerland, only returning to London in 1974.

Significant collections of Nicholson’s work are held by the Tate and by Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, collected by Nicholson’s friend H.S. ‘Jim’ Ede. Although not always seeing eye-to-eye, Ede’s admiration for Nicholson’s work was unwavering, and it was thanks to Nicholson and other artist-friends that Ede originally became interested in contemporary art. After Nicholson’s death, his artistic estate was managed by Nicholson’s companion, the artist Angela Verren Taunt (1930-2023), bequeathed Kettle’s Yard in 2023.