The centennial of the birth of a famous artist is usually cause for celebration. But in the case of British artist Ben Nicholson, whose centennial falls on April 10, it hasn’t turned out quite that way.
An excellent full-scale monograph on Nicholson’s art appeared late last year, during the run of a large, career-long retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London.
However, neither book nor exhibition met with the acclaim one might have predicted in Great Britain, and in the United States they prompted not even a modest re-evaluation of the artist’s achievement.
This is curious because during Nicholson’s lifetime-1894 to 1982-he had the support of such strong writers on British modernism as Herbert Read, John Rothenstein and John Russell, and many of his works entered distinguished public collections in North America, including those of the Albright-Knox Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The 1970 edition of the Oxford Companion to Art called Nicholson “one of the leading British painters of his generation.” And an equally general text on modern art published in England three years later said his work had attained “a point of formal elegance and precision perhaps reached by no other twentieth-century painter.”
This, plus the numerous awards Nicholson received-from museums and expositions in America, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and Brazil-seemed to confirm his status both as an outstanding British artist and an artist whose work had achieved international stature.
But that was not reflected at the time when one most expected it.
“England responded very badly to the centennial show,” says Norbert Lynton, the German-born English author of the recent 472-page monograph on the artist (Phaidon, $125).
“It’s odd. Nobody said Ben Nicholson is a major figure unambiguously. A number of people sort of said, `Well, you know, he’s OK, a kind of petit maitre (little master) who deserves some respect, but let’s not fool ourselves.’ And some people didn’t even say that because a lot of the critics nowadays in England are avant-garde critics, not interested in painting.”
Lynton himself found the 135-piece exhibition a little severe. He says it did not have enough of the white paintings from the 1930s, which established Nicholson as a leader of abstract art in Britain. And the show held few drawings, which the artist always thought important and which he consistently mingled with his paintings.
Still, Lynton’s monograph received much the same reception as the exhibition, and the fact that comments were more against the artist than author perhaps indicates something about the national psyche.
“The English seem terribly reluctant to treat any of their artists as really major,” Lynton says. “I recall very vividly how (19th Century painter J.M.W.) Turner was not talked about with admiration until the late 1950s. Before the big exhibition at the Royal Academy that turned the tide, there was little to read about, let alone enthuse about. There was only one long serious biography, no critical, analytical and elevating writing about him.
“The English have a habit of denigrating their artists; it seems to be a bit of the way we are. I suspect that the Americans, who produce books on, I don’t know, everyone from Mark Rothko to Fairfield Porter, would surely have embraced Ben Nicholson to some degree. But we are still a little delicate about this over here. It’s a kind of embarrassment the English are prone to.”
Nicholson had a long stay in America only once, in 1917, when he spent nine months in Pasadena, Calif., for health reasons. His work was then under the shadow of the popular still-life paintings of his father, William, and he did not escape it until he developed an allegiance to Paul Cezanne and the Cubists that led him close to abstraction in the early 1920s.
Nicholson produced semi-Cubist still lifes until 1928, when he and fellow artist Christopher Wood discovered the work of Alfred Wallis, a naive Cornish painter who directed Nicholson’s interest toward landscape. Still life and landscape painting, practiced with a supreme understanding of Cubist syntax, became the constants in Nicholson’s long career.
The abstract reliefs and paintings he created in the 1930s achieved his greatest fame, though questions remain about how abstract they really are. Nicholson wrote about abstraction as if it allowed him better access to spiritual states. But, by nature and attitude, he was never as priestly as his friend, Piet Mondrian, and Lynton points to many perceptual games that give Nicholson’s highly reduced art a memorable sense of playfulness and joy.
“I think of Ben actually in three ways,” says Richard Francis, a former curator at the Tate Gallery, now chief curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “I think of the great white paintings which the Tate has and which were always a pleasure to hang alongside Mondrian and the people Ben knew in London in the ’30s.
“I also think of earlier pictures, the 1928-29 Cumbrian landscapes and paintings of his wife, Winifred, with their links to Kit Wood and Alfred Wallace. There’s something essentially English about them. It may be provincial, but it’s very beautiful painting. It’s very beautiful tonal painting the like of which I don’t recognize (in America) in the same way.
“Then I think of the ’50s, and the absolutely wonderful big paintings. There are some very good pictures of that period, but they would tend to be disregarded in America because of what was happening here. The rise of the School of New York would put Ben into the shadows, just as it did with artists of the ’40s and ’50s from Paris.”
Nicholson had a solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1951. He earned first prize for painting at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1952. His first American traveling retrospective circulated in 1952 and 1953. He won the first Guggenheim International Award in 1956.
Thereafter, contemporary American painting did indeed dominate, and even Chicago reflected the situation. Nicholson received his first large solo exhibition locally from the Arts Club of Chicago in 1976.
“When it comes to abstract painting, Nicholson has got as much to say as anyone after Mondrian,” says Charles Stuckey, curator of 20th Century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. “And it’s funny it didn’t spread.
“I guess the Museum of Modern Art was the benchmark here in the states, and American museums, in general, were apt to follow its leadership. But MOMA in the ’50s would have little audience for Nicholson since his work was the antithesis of the Abstract Expressionism the museum was trying to champion.
“So Nicholson’s kind of art fell out of attention, and its history became a muddle. A lot of people think Minimalism was new when it happened in the 1960s. But in the early ’50s, Nicholson did some walls, parts of architectural ensembles, that are major precedents to the kind of things Sol LeWitt did in the last 20 years, though I’ve never seen a LeWitt monograph acknowledge them. Once we come to grips with what really happened in the ’50s, bringing in art from all the countries we ignored because of gung-ho nationalism, Nicholson is probably going to have a pretty nice place in the sequence.”
The artist had little tolerance for theorists, living by an intelligence he developed from work and everyday experience. When he wrote about painting being close to religion, it may have sounded high-blown, but not if one had also read how he wanted his painting to give the pleasure of a poodle whose eyes were dark and flashing.
Nicholson became a leader of abstract art in England, but he apparently never was dogmatic about abstraction and, in any case, never stopped representing still lifes and landscapes.
“I think Americans find it difficult to engage in British culture,” says Ben Nicholson, a distant relative of the artist who teaches and practices architecture in Chicago. “Every American friend who used to visit me in London was always on his way to Europe. Always. Britain was winding down. In the ’50s, the writing was more than on the wall. And Nicholson’s work probably was a little bit about that. I think there’s sort of a quiet tragedy about Nicholson that was of his time in Britain.”
Were his sense of decline more pronounced and his expression of tragedy louder, perhaps he would have more widespread acclaim today, for the artist’s native healthfuless appears unusual and, odd as it may sound, perhaps for some diminishes his achievement.
“He was a major artist in an optimistic vein,” says Lynton, “which seems to reach a public less than a vein of misery and dissatisfaction. Francis Bacon touches people more readily than Nicholson does because they expect art to be self expression in a negative sense.
“There have been very few artists in this century whose spirit has been positive and who have made a good job of it, who kept the bubbles going in the soda, so to speak. Brancusi was one. Matisse obviously was one. Mondrian was one, in a more sober, quasi-religious manner. Ben Nicholson, I think, belongs in that family. I am not saying he is their equal necessarily. But he is very much of their company and would be at home with them both as a person and as an artist.”
