Ben Nicholson was born in Denham, Buckinghamshire, the son of the painter Sir William Nicholson. Apart from one term at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, he had no formal art training. Nicholson was one of the most influential British artists of the 20th Century, celebrated for his ability to synthesise and abstract from nature its bare essentials and re-form them in compositions of extreme elegance and clarity. From 1933 he was a member of Unit One with Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore and Edward Wadsworth. He spent some travelling abroad before settling in London between 1932 - 1939, but it was on his move to the small fishing town of St Ives on the coast of Cornwall, in the south west of England, that his art took new directions. For the most part his paintings and reliefs are geometrically organised, playing formal and austere lines against blocks of subdued colour, achieving a balance between line and suggested volume. He always retained his interest in landscape, and the clear, bright light of Cornwall was probably instrumental in developing his sense of light, almost transparent colour, through which objects are filtered rather then merely described.

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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  • Art Project