Description

Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson original painting. 100% original.

Minimum price for this painting is 900.000,00€

One single work by Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) can, at best, encompass architectural, sculptural, and painterly qualities, all the while retaining a powerful overarching worldview fueled by innocence, romance, and simplicity. Nicholson’s career was long and impressive and can be divided into many phases. Even though early works appear naïve and childlike, he always experimented with pioneering theoretical and formal ways of making a picture. He initially favored still life and landscape compositions painted in a poetic and naturalistic style. From the early 1930s onwards however, his work began to develop in a more modernist direction, and he embraced working under the influence of late Cubism and abstraction. Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Barbara Hepworth all in turn had profound impact on the vision and style of Ben Nicholson.

Throughout his career, there is an undiminished sense of a humble task at hand: that of honoring the beauty of landscape and life lived within it using a harmonious combination of color, line, and shape.

In France Ben Nicholson joined the Abstraction-Création group, after being invited by Jean Hélion.

Between 1938 and 1940 he lived in Hampstead, where his neighbour was Mondrian, who was briefly residing in London between stays in Paris and New York. In 1940, with second wife Hepworth, he moved to St Ives in Cornwall. Many artists came to join them here, particularly after the war, and formed a group around him. In 1958 he moved to Brissago in Switzerland for several years, returning to England again in 1971. He was awarded numerous prizes and distinctions: in 1952 he won the Carnegie Prize at the International Exhibition in Pittsburgh; in 1956 he won the First Guggenheim International Prize; in 1957 he won the International Painting Prize at the São Paulo Biennale; and in 1958 he won a major prize at the Venice Biennale.