Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson (1894 – 1982) was born in Denham, UK, to artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde and studied at the Slade School of Art from 1910 to 1911. During his formative years Nicholson travelled extensively in Europe and America and while his early works were still lifes, in the 1920s he began creating figurative and abstract works inspired by Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In 1927, painting alongside his wife Winifred (née Roberts) and Christopher Wood, Nicholson developed a consciously naïve landscape style, influenced by Alfred Wallis’s example. By 1933, Nicholson was living in Hampstead with sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who he married in 1938, and producing his first geometric and abstract reliefs in the highly abstract style for which he is most famous.

Between 1939 and 1958, Nicholson 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 touring exhibitions. He won first prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1952, the Guggenheim International painting prize in 1956, the international prize for painting at the 1957 São Paulo Art Biennial, and in 1964 exhibited a large relief wall at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Major retrospectives of Nicholson’s work were held internationally including 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.

In the UK significant collections of Ben Nicholson’s work are held by the Tate and by Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge.