Ben Nicholson

BIOGRAPHY

English painter (Denham, Buckinghamshire, 1894 – Hampstead 1982), son of William. He studied at the Slade art school in London, then in Tours and in Milan, and finally in Pasadena (USA). He participated in the groups Seven and five (1925-36), Unit one (1933) and, from 1933 to 1935, Abstraction – creation in Paris, where (in 1934) he met Mondrian, to whom he was still close when he took refuge in London. With J. L. Martin and N. Gabo he published Circle (1937), an international collection of constructive art. With B. Hepworth, his wife, and Gabo he was a point of reference in the British artistic world. In 1941 he published Notes on abstract art on Horizon.

Present at the most significant international exhibitions, N. received numerous prizes, including the Ulisse Prize of the Venice Biennale in 1954 and the Rembrandt Prize in 1974. After a vortical debut, then cubist, from 1933 he elaborated completely abstract paintings in which the forms they are subjected to an internal discipline of the painting, almost in a musical composition. From 1945 his style became more flexible, ready to welcome “natural objects” (architectural specimens) within a harmony of unmistakable classicism.