English abstract painter Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was the son of noted artists Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. Ben Nicholson was born at the former Eight Bells PH (now White Cottage), Village Road, Denham, Buckinghamshire, in 1894, was baptised at the nearby church of St Mary, and moved to London with his parents two years later. He studied at the Slade School, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, another Buckinghamshire artist, and then travelled widely in Europe and the United States for a few years. In 1920 Nicholson married the artist Winifred Roberts. Nicholson’s early work consists of delicately worked still lifes, which show the influence of his father. In the 1920s he began painting figurative and abstract works inspired by Post Impressionism and Cubism, which he had seen whilst travelling. His first one-man show was at the Adelphi Gallery in 1921. In 1932 he visited Paris with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and met Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp.
On subsequent visits to Paris in 1933 and 1934 they met Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy. His works reflect his contact with Braque, and suggest the influence of both Hepworth and Mondrian. In 1937 he became editor of Circle, and from 1939 to 1958 lived in Cornwall with Barbara Hepworth, whom he married in 1938.
His later work moved regularly between abstraction and figuration, always with cool, harmonious colours, subtle textures and precise interlocking shapes. In 1945/46 he moved from reliefs to linear, abstract paintings. Nicholson was commissioned to paint a mural for the Time-Life Building in London in 1952. In 1954 he was given retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and at the Tate Gallery, London, and in 1955 the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 1958 he moved to Ticino in Switzerland, but eventually moved back to London, where he died in February 1982.
Ben Nicholson's work has come to be seen as the quintessence of British modernism. His austere geometric paintings and reliefs are among some of the most influential abstract works in British art.
During his long career he produced works influenced by a variety of styles including, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Neoplasticism. He combined "dirty-textured" earth tones with sections of "clean-flat" bright colors.
