Ben Nicholson photographed at his home in Hampstead around 1936.
Ben Nicholson is widely recognised as one of the leading British artists of his generation. His Abstract paintings, prints, and reliefs gained him significant success during his lifetime, and his influence can still be felt today, more than forty years since his death.
Nicholson’s work also still fetches respectable prices, especially in the United Kingdom. April 57 (Arbia 2), his most expensive painting sold at auction, reached £3.2 million in 2016, and his prints (which account for 55% of his work sold at auction) tend to fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, regularly exceeding their estimates.
Ben Nicholson had an interesting and somewhat complicated personal life, having been married and divorced three times before his death aged 87 in 1982, and it is interesting to know some facts about him when considering his art. Therefore, below are six things you might not have known about Ben Nicholson.
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He Came From An Artistic Family
Ben Nicholson was born in April 1894, and both of his parents were painters. His father, Sir William Nicholson, achieved significant recognition for his paintings and prints, and two of his siblings (Nancy Nicholson and Christopher Nicholson) also made names for themselves in artistic fields.
This proliferation of talents, however, somewhat strained familial relationships, particularly between Ben Nicholson and his father, a traditionalist who disliked his son’s avant-garde style so much that upon visiting one of his exhibitions in 1935, he asked: “Why don’t you paint proper pictures?” Tensions weren’t helped when, after Ben Nicholson’s mother died, his girlfriend at the time decided to marry his newly-widowed father. It is a strange twist of fate that Sir William Nicholson is now better remembered for being the father of his far more famous son than for any of his own artwork.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £34,000
Letters and Numbers is a linocut from around 1933, when Nicholson’s art had shifted away from the figurative paintings of his youth in favour of Cubism and Abstraction, the style he would eventually become famous for. The print is a linocut on cloth featuring a seemingly random mixture of letters, numbers, and shapes, and it was sold by Sotheby’s in May 2012 for £34,000, nearly seven times its estimate.
Letters and Numbers sold by Sotheby’s in 2012
He Was Part Of The Abstraction-Création Group
The Abstraction-Création group was established in 1931 and continued until 1936. Based in Paris, it was a loose association of artist who all promoted Abstract art to counteract the influence of the Surrealists led by André Breton. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth joined the group in 1933, the same year (it is thought) that Nicholson created Letters and Numbers, his most expensive print sold at auction. Nicholson and Hepworth were also prominent members of UK-based groups, including the Seven and Five Society and the St Ives’ School; the latter became a focal point of post-World War II modern artists, led by Nicholson and Hepworth.
He Was Married To Barbara Hepworth
Ben Nicholson met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1931. There was a strong attraction, but each of them was married to different people at the time. Over the next few years, however, they developed a romantic relationship, and they eventually married in 1938. Unsurprisingly, each of them influenced the other’s work; Nicholson’s Profiles print of 1933, for instance, displays distinctly Hepworth-inspired silhouettes and forms, along with Cubist influences from artists such as Picasso.
Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth
He Lived In Switzerland
After achieving recognition in the mid-1950s, Nicholson and his third wife – German photographer Felicitas Vogler – moved to Switzerland for several years. From this base, they travelled extensively and explored many countries, including Greece, Italy, and Turkey. Nicholson was inspired by the buildings, views, and motifs he encountered on these travels, and many of his most sought-after prints reflect this, including Rhodos (Variations on a Theme, no.4, and Greek and Turkish Forms.
He Was Interested In Buildings
On his travels, Nicholson was repeatedly influenced by the different architectural styles he encountered, as can be seen in many of the prints from Greek and Turkish Forms, and from Architectural Suite, a series in which the artist reduced beautiful buildings to basic lines and shapes.
As Nicholson once said, “the kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is both musical and architectural, where the architectural construction is used to express a “musical” relationship between form, tone and colour.”
