Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson, son of painter Sir William Nicholson, was born in Denham, England, in 1894 and lived in Hampstead, England, until his death in 1982. He attended the Slad School of Fine Art, London, in 1910-11, and in 1912 he began traveling. After World War I he made frequent trips to Paris, where he was exposed to Cubism, which inspired his first abstract paintings of 1924. He was a guiding member of the 7 & 5 society, a group of abstract artists, from 1924 to its disbanding in 1936. In 1933 he joined the Abstraction-Creation group and made his first abstract relief at the end of that year. The following year he married sculptor Barbara Hepworth. After he visited Piet Mondrian in Paris, his reliefs evolved into strictly geometric compositions of white forms. In 1935-36 he produced Circle, a journal dedicated to Constructivist art, in collaboration with Naum Gabo and J. L. Marting. A move to the Cornish coast in 1939 inspired an outburst of color and an interest in landscape in his art. From 1945 to 1949, he explored still life. In 1950 he began producing his famous large color reliefs. He has his first solo show at the Adelphi Gallery in London in1922, and his first show in America at the Durlacher Gallery in New York. He is now considered one of England's greatest twentieth-century artists. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1975 and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, which subsequently toured the United States. His long-standing interest in naive treatment belied an assured and often playful line. In the still lifes from the 1970s, which incorporated tools, as in his architectural studies, the variety of linear expression ranged from careful description to swift characterization.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.