Ben Nicholson British, 1894-1982
"The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point"
-Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson (10 April 1894 - 6 February 1982) was a British painter and sculptor whose Cubist-influenced works significantly contributed to the history of abstraction.
Nicholson's earliest works were naturalistic landscapes and still lifes influenced by his father's work however after visiting the Parisian studios of Georges Braque, Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian Nicholson's work grew increasingly concerned with formal structure. During the late 1920s, Nicholson lived in the town of St. Ives, where he worked alongside the painters Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and Barbara Hepworth. In the 1930s Nicholson began making works which melded sculpture, architecture, and design elements into simple forms. Over time, Nicholson's style would loosen from the severe formalism of the 1930s, becoming a synthesis of observed visual information and linear abstraction.
Nicholson won the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1952, and in 1968 received the British Order of Merit. Today, Nicholson's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.