BEN NICHOLSON

Ben Nicholson Biography

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982)
Born into a family of artists, Nicholson studied at the Slade (1919-1911). In 1920 he married the artist Winifred Roberts and for the next three years they divided their time between London, Cumberland and Lugano in Switzerland. During the mid 1930s he lived in London and made several trips to Paris where he visited the studios of Picasso, Braque, Arp, Brancusi and Mondrian. In 1939 he and his second wife, Barbara Hepworth moved to Cornwall where they became central to the artists' colony living and working around the Carbis Bay area. During the 1920s he began to experiment with abstraction and continued to develop this during the 1930s and 1940s. By this point he had become a member of the Paris-based association of international abstract artists, Abstraction-Création. Nicholson's awards and accolades have been numerous. In 1952 he won first prize at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh and in 1956 first Guggenheim International painting prize. The following year he won the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Bienale and went on to receive the Order of Merit in 1968. There have been several retrospective exhibitions of his work both in Britain and abroad including the Tate (1954-55 and 1993-94) and Kunsthalle, Berne (1961). This and the many British Council tours he was included in during the 1940s and 1950s have ensured that Nicholson is seen to epitomise British Modernism.