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| Ben Nicholson: Mousehole 194 |
Born in Denham, Buckinghamshire in 1894. Ben had a lot to aspire to having parents who were both artists. His mother was Mabel Pryde, his father, William Nicholson, who met each other at the Bushey School of Art. William would go on to a be a great poster designer in his own right.
Having studied at the Slade School of fine Art, Ben became quite a worldly person, travelling in Europe and America and in 1920, he married Winifred Roberts, an impressionistic artist. Despite adopting a style of art similar to his father, Nicholson's first exhibition in London 1922 was of a more figurative piece influenced by Synthetic Cubism and Post Impressionism.
Then whilst in France, he met Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Arp and so further peaked his interest in Cubism and Abstract art On Subsequent visits he met dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who introduced Ben to the artistic movement of De Stijl or Neoplasticism. This utopian style of art would seem quite refreshing to Nicholson, the simplicity in colours and form, and the order that the geometry created. From the places he had traveled and the people he had met, Ben Nicholson was able to incorporate the various styles he came across and add them his own technique in a plausible way.
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| The above picture is of "White Relief", the first wood relief Nicholson made in Paris in 1933 |
In 1937 he became editor of Circle: An International Survey of Constructivist Art, along with Naum Gabo. After the breakdown of his marriage, Nicholson lived in Cornwall with Barbara Hepworth from 1939 to 1958. Fleeting between abstraction and figuration art work, Nicholson used cool, natural colours, soft textures and precise interlocking shapes. Then in 1945 he moved from making reliefs to working on linear, abstract paintings. Having married for a third time and moving to Switzerland, Nicholson eventually moved back to London where he died in 1982.
Why does he simplify still life forms and negative space and superimpose them on the Cornish Landscape?
In all honesty, I am unsure why Nicholson does this because I have not found a definitive answer. But in my search I have found possible reasons but again, this is just speculation and only an opinion. From a psychology and sociology standpoint, I think the reason why people act in deliberate ways is through their peers or of people of influence in your life, both positive and negative. If we look at the obvious, Nicholson is very influenced by Picasso, Mondrian, Braque etc and part of his personality is to learn new skills from others and then combine it with what he knows which may indicate an unhappiness or unsatisfaction with himself or work, and the need to keep improving. Another reason could be that of his first wife, Winifred, an impressionist artist herself who clearly had some shared influence with her husbands work, for example, see how they paint from inside the window.
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| Winifred Nicholson, From Bedroom Window |
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| Ben Nicholson 1946 St Ives |
Personally, I think Ben Nicholson alters the Cornish Landscape as a means to get away from his fathers style of drawing. Coming for an artist family, there would be pressure to succeed and even a bit of rivalry of any success gained. Sanford Schwartz suggests that " one reason we are now so uncertain of where to rank William is the constant denigration he suffered from Ben, who felt the need to dismiss his father so that he himself could take the commanding place he felt he deserved" and that "Being regularly combative and jealous of Ben’s own reputation, William was savagely scornful of his son’s early efforts. Ben’s jealousy may well have derived from William first gaining fame as half of a two-headed monster, the Beggarstaff Brothers," (The Times, 2004)
The relationship with his father may not be the sole reason for how Nicholson paints but it is possible that this feeling to disassociate himself made him more susceptible and enthusiastic to explore other movements. It is possible that he felt as though traditional styles of painting did not convey all that was there, and the cubism approach lets the viewer see different aspects of the Cornish Landscape from mulitple angles while the negative space served to draw the viewer into the detail of the painting. It could also be that Nicholson wanted to incorporate his abstract approach to a traditional landscape as a way of getting his style recognized more in the mainstream, it is said he had the belief that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public.Finally, it could also be argued that Nicholson turned to landscapes in order to earn a living during the war years, switching from relief to linear at the end of World War 2.
I am still unsure of why painted the way he did, but it seems to me that because of all that influenced him, made him see the world in a particular way, poetically put in this quote:
Outside his Cornish studio the world must have seemed exceedingly disorderly: most days the sky going by at a tremendous pace; the sluicing of waves and exploding of breakers, that endless pitiless tugging at the headlands by the sea; prevailing winds, quoits and stone hedges; the underworld of tin lodes; the hardship of it all, generation after generation; harbors like churchyards, bobbing with coffins. Only very slowly did this have an effect on what he was doing.
Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape
Information Sourced From :
http://cma.staging-thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/article2399623.ece
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nicholson-1936-white-relief-sculpture-version-1-t07274/text-summary
http://www.artrepublic.com/biographies/85-ben-nicholson.html
http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/ben-nicholsons-cornwall/
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