Ben Nicholson [antikvár]

BEN NICHOLSON Early years Ben Nicholson was born in the last decade of the reign of Queen Victoria on 10 April 1894. The Victorian era was particularly important in the history of British art beginning with late Constable and Turner, succeeded by the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement and finally the beginnings of the illustrious career of Walter Richard Sickert. By the time that Ben Nicholson embarked on his career as an artist, however, the British art scene had undergone a remarkable convulsion which divided the art world and which was to stimulate him into seeking to rebel against the traditions of Victorian and Edwardian painting. By then the challenging theorists were Roger Fry and Clive Bell who, through the organisation of exhibitions, the delivery of lectures and the publication of books, changed the direction of the British avant-garde. Ben Nicholson was the eldest son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. He was educated principally in London and left school at the age of sixteen to attend the Slade School of Fine Art. His father William was a successful portraitist, as well as a considerable painter of landscape and still life. He was described by Ben Nicholson as 'very lively and elegant dandified but always with a very special taste of his own and he alternated this with looking like a tramp.' As a painter of members of high society he mixed with affluent people but his own lifestyle was rather more bohemian. Together with James Pryde, his brother-in-law, he formed 'J. W. Beggarstaff designing posters which Ben Nicholson regarded as 'a complete revolution in their time (1893)' (all quotes from 'William Nicholson' in M. de Sausmarez (ed.), Ben Nicholson, London 1969). These graphic works were dramatic, with broad flat forms and an economic use of stencilled colour, and incorporated lettering as an integral part of the design, a feature which would not be lost on Ben Nicholson in later years. His mother, Mabel Pryde, was also a painter, although after the birth of her children she had little time to develop her talent. The Nicholsons had a wide circle of friends including William Orpen, Max Beerbohm and Sickert as well as strong links with the theatrical and literary world. William published a series of books with colour woodcuts under the Heinemann imprint and in 1900 he was awarded a gold medal for his woodcuts at the Exposi- tion Universelle in Paris. From this moment on, however, he turned back to painting. Apparently untouched by the critical debates of the second decade of the century, Wilham Nicholson certainly would have been aware of them, just as he would have been acquainted with the artists and critics who were associated with Bloomsbury. More important for Ben, however, was that he came from a family of painters and that his father was playful in life but direct in his approach to painting. Ben Nicholson attended the Slade School of Fine Art in 1910, the same year that Roger Fry mounted 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists', the exhibition in which he introduced Post-Impressionist painting to London, particularly Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. Matisse, Detain and Picasso were also represented but only one of the latter's paintings in this exhibition gave a hint of what he was exploring at this time. Fry's 'Second Post Impressionist Exhibition' of 1912 was more radical in its introduction of Fauvism and Cubism which he combined with the more avant-garde aspects of British art, notably the work of Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis, selected by the critic Clive Bell. Nicholson may have seen the first of these exhibitions but he would have missed the second of them, since he spent much of the time between the end of 1911 and 1913 abroad learning foreign languages. His attendance at the Slade lasted only three and a half terms. His short stay was the result not only of his impatience with the academic manner of teaching under Professor Henry Tonks but also a lack of conviction that he wished to pursue an artistic career. Indeed he had given some consideration to becoming a writer. Nicholson relates how he spent most of his time at the Slade playing bilUards with Paul Nash in the nearby Gower Hotel. He stated some thirty years later that Nash 'was much more serious than I was — I was in the painting world and trying to get out and he was out and trying to get in' (letter to John Summerson 6 May 1944). Judging by the earliest of his paintings which survive, he was untouched by his experience at the Slade but was more influenced by the painting of his father. The earliest known paintings by Nicholson were made in a manner typical of traditional Edwardian painters and were principally still lifes, although he also painted portraits, such as 1917 (portrait ofEdie), which has a clarity of form and light which anticipates the