Ben Nicholson

Art Brokerage: Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson British Artist: b. 1894-1982. Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson was an English abstract painter. Nicholson was the son of the painter Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and the brother of Nancy 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 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: first to Winifred Roberts (married 1920 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London; divorced 1938) with whom he 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. His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth (married 1938 at Hampstead Register Office; divorced 1951) with whom he had triplets, two daughters Sarah and Rachel and a son Simon in 1934 and third marriage to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer (married 1957; divorced 1977). Ben Nicholson's 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, Nicholson did a poster for Peter Pan. 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 England in 1918. After his 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 London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth 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 died in London in 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, and at Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge. Listings wanted.