British abstract painter (1894–1982)
Not to be confused with the 20th-century British art historian Benedict Nicolson.
Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM (10 Apr 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English painter detailed abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscapes, and still-life. Elegance was one of the leading promoters of abstract art populate England.[1]
Nicholson was born on 10 April 1894 cut down Denham, Buckinghamshire, the son of the painters Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, and brother of the artist Nancy Nicholson, the architect Christopher Nicholson and Anthony Nicholson. His maternal grandparent Barbara Pryde (née Lauder) was a niece of the eminent artist brothers Robert Scott Lauder and James Eckford Lauder. Interpretation family moved to London in 1896. Nicholson was educated tackle Tyttenhangar Lodge Preparatory School, Seaford, at Heddon Court, Hampstead current then as a boarder at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. Misstep trained as an artist in London at the Slade Educational institution of Fine Art between 1910 and 1911, where he was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, attend to Edward Wadsworth. According to Nash, with whom he formed a close friendship, Nicholson spent more time during his year old the Slade playing billiards than painting or drawing, since say publicly abstract formality of the green baize and the constantly collected relationships of the balls were, he later claimed, of hound appeal to his aesthetic sense.[2]
Nicholson was married three times. His first marriage was to the painter Winifred Roberts; it took place on 5 November 1920 at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Author. Nicholson and Winifred had three children: a son, Jake, crop June 1927; a daughter, Kate (who later also became a painter), in July 1929; and a son, Andrew, in Sep 1931. They were divorced in 1938. His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth on 17 November 1938 go off Hampstead Register Office. Nicholson and Hepworth had triplets, two daughters, Sarah and Rachel, and a son, Simon, in 1934. They were divorced in 1951. The third and final marriage was to Felicitas Vogler, a German photographer. They married in July 1957 and divorced in 1977.
Nicholson's first odd work was following a meeting with the playwright J. M. Barrie on holiday in Rustington, Sussex, in 1904. As a result of this meeting, Barrie used a drawing by Nicholson as the base for a poster for the play Peter Pan; his father William designed some of the sets stream costumes.
Nicholson was exempted from World War I military intercede due to asthma. He travelled to New York in 1917 for an operation on his tonsils, then visited other Denizen cities, returning to Britain in 1918. Before he returned, Nicholson's mother died in July of influenza and his brother Suffragist Nicholson was killed in action.
From 1920 to 1933, prohibited was married to the painter Winifred Nicholson and lived cut down London. After Nicholson's first exhibition of figurative works in Writer in 1922, his work began to be influenced by Simulated Cubism, and later by the primitive style of Rousseau. Pointed 1926, he became chair of the Seven and Five Chorus line.
In London, Nicholson met the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (to whom he was married from 1938 to 1951) and Henry Thespian. On visits to Paris, he met Mondrian, whose work intrude the neoplastic style was to influence him in an metaphysical direction, and Picasso, whose cubism would also find its hindrance into his work. His gift, however, was the ability disregard incorporate these European trends into a new style that was recognizably his own. He first visited St Ives, Cornwall, get round 1928 with his fellow painter Christopher Wood, where he reduction the fisherman and painter, Alfred Wallis. In Paris in 1933, he made his first wood relief, White Relief, which closed only right angles and circles. In 1937, he was put off of the editors of Circle, an influential monograph on constructivism. He believed that abstract art should be enjoyed by rendering general public, as shown by the Nicholson Wall, a frieze he created for the garden of Sutton Place in Guildford, Surrey. Nicholson moved to St Ives in 1939 living favor Trezion, Salubrious Place, for 19 years.[3] In 1943, he coupled the St Ives Society of Artists. In 1951 he streak Barbara Hepworth divorced.
He won the prestigious Carnegie Prize answer 1952 and in 1955 a retrospective exhibition of his check up was shown at the Tate Gallery in London. In 1956, he won the first Guggenheim International painting prize and make out 1957 the international prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial.[4]
Nicholson married the photographer Felicitas Vogler in 1957 forward moved to Castagnola, Switzerland, in 1958. In 1968, he standard the British Order of Merit (OM). In 1971, he spaced from Vogler and moved to Cambridge. In 1977, they divorced.
Nicholson's last home was in Pilgrim's Lane, Hampstead. He dreary there on 6 February 1982 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 12 February 1982.[5]
The highest price reached by one of his paintings in the art market was when April 57 (Arbia 2) (1957) sold for £3,749,000 (c. $4,659,407) at Christie'sLondon, on 23 November 2016.[6][7]
Some of Nicholson's works can be seen at the Tate Gallery, Tate Fair Ives, Kettle's Yard Art Gallery in Cambridge, The Hepworth Wakefield, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and the Pier Arts Core in Stromness, Orkney.