Ben Nicholson was marked from the start for a life of art; his father, William Nicholson, was an excellent painter whose work today is in many public galleries, while his mother Mabel had been trained as an artist and was the sister of James Pryde, another painter of note. On top of this, Ben married as his first wife a painter of genius, Winifred Roberts, now deservedly remembered as Winifred Nicholson, and his second wife was the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, a formidable woman in every sense.
There seems in the past decade to have been a tendency, or even a half-conscious campaign, to lower him from the key position he held in British art from the early 1930s, at least, to his death in 1982. I find this hard to understand, since Nicholson added an extra, largely Continental dimension to the English painting of his time when it needed precisely that. Without sinking into the provincial, imitative pseudo-Frenchness of many of his predecessors and contemporaries (Bloomsbury in particular), he always seemed able to take the big movements of his era - Cubism, abstraction, Constructivism - in his stride, to learn from them and make them his own, but never let them dominate or mould him. And for that, he needed not only outstanding talent but also strength of character, acute intelligence and a depth of self-belief.
Nicholson's childhood was not happy; his father and mother were ill-suited, an early age he was packed off to boarding school, which he hated. He was much more at home at the Slade School of Art, where women outnumbered the men three to one - and all his life Nicholson was a lady's man. Though small and hard-featured, he was a dapper dandy, a social charmer when he chose to be, a strong personality and quietly, but unstoppably, ambitious. He soon fell in love with a fellow-student, Edie Stuart-Wortley, but though they became semi-engaged she turned instead to his father, William, and surprisingly married him (he was now free from his ungiving and egotistical first wife).
Ben's own marriage to Winifred Roberts, who was talented but also large, plain and eccentrically religious, seems to have been prompted by her motherly nature as much as her talent. She did in fact make a devoted wife and mother, and together they became a force in the new was painfully taking shape; but Nicholson by his temperament seemed always drawn to triangular relationships. So he drifted into an intense affair with Barbara Hepworth, already married to the sculptor John Skeaping, which eventually broke up both his own marriage and hers. When he and Hepworth married, they formed one of the most famous and significant partnerships in the history of art, one around which British art for at least a generation was largely built.
With Christopher ("Kit") Wood, Ben was largely responsible for discovering the old primitive painter Alfred Wallis and for realising the potential of the area of Cornwall around St Ives as an art colony. But he never was content with merely a home or national base and soon made contact with various Modernist pioneers in France and elsewhere, including Mondrian who became a kind of substitute father-figure.
The Seven and Five, in which he was prominent, was probably the first genuine modernist art grouping in England - movements such as Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism, in spite of the prominence they are given in many art histories, are little more than museum pieces. At a time when the Royal Academy was still unduly powerful and Augustus John was widely regarded as Britain's greatest painter, it fought all the essential battles and could also back up its avant-garde theories with sheer weight of talent.
NICHOLSON is usually credited with being one of the first English abstract artists, as well as one of the purest and most extreme of them, which is true and deserved; yet for much or most of his mature career he combined it with figurative work. He was a pragmatist rather than a dogmatist, in fact, though tough and unyielding in controversy and argument. With the second World War looming ahead, he, Hepworth (with whom he now had triplets) and the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo retired to St Ives, where they set up a virtual art dictatorship until the younger generation - which owed them a great deal - increasingly but sometimes acrimoniously broke free. Hepworth, in particular, proved a domineering, difficult, personality, as well as being overfond of intrigue, and it was largely due to her that Gabo, when the war ended, took off for America with his wife Miriam.
Nicholson's old amatory pattern persisted; he conducted a long affair with a married woman, Rhoda Littler, and then married for a third time - to a German-Swiss, Felicitas Vogeler, later to become a talented photographer. Barbara, so it is said, never really got over this even though they remained friends, in constant contact, and are said to have valued each other's opinions on their work almost exclusive of anyone else's. Life in Switzerland, however, did not suit Nicholson, nor did his new wife's cooking (or lack of it); and eventually he returned to England, where in his last years he found companionship with another married woman, Angela Verren-Taunt.
It was a platonic relationship and she refused to leave her husband, a decision which Nicholson took hard. By now he was one of the grand old men of art, with an OM to his name and respected around the globe, even though conceptualism had arrived to muddy the waters of Modernism. Nicholson remained somehow on good terms with his first two wives while they lived, and Barbara's death in a fire, at her studio-home in St Ives, was a considerable blow to him. Winifred too pre-deceased him, dying a year before her ex-husband, who passed away in a coma in February 1982, two months short of his 88th birthday.
I never met Ben Nicholson, nor even saw him, but I met a good many people who had known him, some of them well (I do not say "intimately" because plainly he did not encourage intimacy, except with a few people). Almost all of them spoke of him with deep respect, but very few with any real affection. Cool, self-centred, rather detached and manipulative in his handling both of his own career and of fellow-artists, unclubbable and unpubbable, Nicholson apparently cared little for close friendships, and the more romantic, emotional side of his nature seems to have been reserved almost entirely for women. He was, in any case, a compulsive worker all his life, capable of living like a hermit in his studio for weeks on end, and a perfectionist who demanded the utmost of himself and his work. (The appeal of that work, too, is as much formal and intellectual as sensuous.)
Sarah Checkland has an excellent subject and her book could hardly escape being readable, though it is spoilt intermittently by intellectual naivete and sometimes by failures of judgment. For instance, dealing with the complexities of St Ives art politics in the immediate post-war years is an undertaking which the best art scholars would find a thorny assignment; she has tackled them courageously, but in doing so has committed some howlers. Her assessment of the character of Peter Lanyon is so one-sided as to be unrecognisable, and she even describes an incident in 1946 in which he allegedly tried to run down with his car a fellow-artist, Sven Berlin, in one of the narrow streets of St Ives. The account presumably comes from Berlin himself, now (like Lanyon) dead.
This, to be blunt, strains all credibility. According to her, Lanyon was motivated by hatred of a rival, but would Lanyon - a major painter - have bothered with the challenge of Berlin, an eccentric and poseur whose artistic pretensions were taken seriously by few people except himself? Nor did I, in numerous visits to the area over more than 30 years, ever hear anyone allude to such an incident. Far better and wiser to have left it out, and I doubt if Nicholson himself, if he ever heard the story, can have given it much credence. He and Lanyon - once his protege - ended in estrangement, but not in hatred; they were two men who had taken each other's stature.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic