Ben Nicholson, Relief Aug 1960 (Milan), 1960

English artist Ben Nicholson (b. 1894, England) produced some of the most significant abstract works in the history of Modern British Art, including his geometric paintings and reliefs, which were both austere and elegant.

He was primarily self-taught and attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London for a brief period in 1910–1911 as the son of painter Sir William Nicholson. Between 1911 and 1914, he made a lot of trips throughout Europe. In 1917, he went to California, where he meticulously sketched the state's landscape and architectural features. He started painting seriously around 1920, producing landscapes and still lifes in a traditional realistic manner.

Nicholson's initial semiabstract still lifes were inspired by works by Cubist artists he visited in Paris in 1921; his first fully abstract painting was completed in 1924. Together with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who later became his second wife, Nicholson played a key role in bringing Continental Modernism to English art throughout the 1920s. He and Hepworth became members of the Abstraction-Création group, a Paris-based society of artists that promoted only abstract art, in 1933. Additionally, Nicholson encountered Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter whose influence led to a significant simplification of Nicholson's geometric style; examples of this style are his low reliefs, including White Relief (1937–38), which feature whitewashed circles and rectangles. He coedited Circle, a 1937 manifesto to support Constructivism and other modern art movements in England, alongside the artist Naum Gabo and the architect Sir Leslie Martin.

Nicholson came back to landscape and still-life subjects in the 1940s; he frequently included simple still-life motifs into paintings that were otherwise primarily abstract. He persisted in alternating between representational and abstract styles in his latter work.

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Ben Nicholson

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