Ben Nicholson & the Post-War Landscape of the 1920s
“To say a thing was modern was to say it was ‘good’ sweeping away Victorian, Edwardian, Old Theology, Old Tory views. In the new world there would be no slums, no uneccessary palm trees, no false ornament- but clarity, white walls, simplicity- complete and satisfying.” Winifred Nicholson.
Nicholson was born on 10th April 1894, son of William Nicholson, a successful painter of the Victorian era. In 1910, Benjamin, or Ben as he became known, joined the Slade and shared the same preferences and dislikes as Paul Nash who studied alongside him. Not enamoured of the Slade, after signing the Slade Book, Nicholson would abscond to play billiards for the rest of the day- this became part of his legend.[1] After a period in California because of his asthma, he returned to England in 1918 the year his mother died of influenza. Two years later Nicholson met Winifred Roberts; they married in November 1920 and divided their time between London and a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. In 1923 they acquired Banks Head, a farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall in Cumberland. Nicholson would also spend time painting in St Ives, Cornwall, while maintaining connections in London. This physical flight from the capital to rural painting centres might be seen in terms of a wish for “utopian idealism” as described above by Winifred Nicholson.[2] As for Nicholson himself, though he painted un-metropolitan subjects, he still used the works of modernist artists like Cézanne and Picasso for building up geometrical form; but Nicholson introduced a kind of naïve primitivism (above) into his art, influenced by the untutored Cornish fisherman, Alfred Wallis, from whom he took the idea of introducing clusters of personal visual symbols into his painting, like the horse and the boat. Particularly important to Nicholson’s artistic development was Cornwall, not for the scenes of Cornish life that Newlyn School artists like Stanhope Forbes had painted, but as a source of artistic inspiration. It should also be remembered that the Nicholsons were interested in Christian Science, so some of those principles may inform the quiet, austere views of Cornwall and Cumberland in their art of the 1920s. Mention should also be made of Christopher Wood who worked with the Nicholsons in Cornwall, and like them was part of the “Seven and Five” group, an antidote to the London Group which was, in Nicholson’s memorable words a “dog’s dinner” controlled by Bloomsbury. An early admirer of Augustus John, and blessed with an entrée to the sophisticated French art world, Wood eventually came under the influence of the insular landscape and coastal painting of the Nicholsons resulting in a complete change of style. Sadly, he took his own life in 1930
[1] Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, (Pimlico, 2000), 29.
[2] Ysanne Holt, “Landscapes of the 1920s” in A Continuous Line: Ben Nicholson in England, (Tate, 2008-9), 21- 40.
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