Ben Nicholson

Pink, Red and Black - 20th Century, Ink & oil on paper by Ben Nicholson

1978

Ben Nicholson, one of Britain’s most influential modernist painters, was the son of renowned artist William Nicholson. His early career was shaped by extensive travels during the 1920s with his first wife, Winifred Roberts, living between Cumberland, London, Paris, and Switzerland. Initially experimenting with a post-Cézanne style, Nicholson later embraced a more consciously "primitive" approach to landscape painting in 1927, influenced by his encounter with the work of Alfred Wallis. Between 1931 and 1939, while living in London, Nicholson became closely associated with leading artists and critics such as Henry Moore, John Piper, Naum Gabo, and Herbert Read. Encounters with European modernists, including Hans Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Piet Mondrian, and Jean Hélion, profoundly shaped his artistic direction. By the late 1930s, he had developed the highly abstract style for which he is best known. In 1931, Nicholson met sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who would become his second wife. During World War II, they relocated to St Ives with Gabo and Adrian Stokes, contributing to the town’s emergence as a centre for modernist art. By the 1950s and 1960s, Nicholson had gained an international reputation, his work celebrated for its purity of form and pioneering abstraction. Following the war, he lived in London, Cambridge, and Switzerland at various times. In later years, he married for a third time, to photographer Felicitas Vogler, continuing to refine his artistic vision until his death in 1982.