NICHOLSON, BEN

born April 10, 1894, Denham, Buckinghamshire, Eng. died Feb. 6, 1982, London English artist whose austere geometric paintings and reliefs were among the most influential abstract works in British art. The son of the painter Sir William Nicholson, he was largely self-taught and only briefly attended the Slade School of Fine Art (191011), London. He traveled extensively in Europe between 1911 and 1914 and in 1917 visited California, keeping a detailed record in sketches of architecture and landscape. During the 1920s, along with the sculptors Barbara Hepworth (who became his second wife) and Henry Moore, Nicholson was instrumental in introducing continental modernism into England. His first semiabstract still lifes reflected his exposure to Synthetic Cubism in Paris. In 1933 he met the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, under whose influence his work took on a cooler geometry; typical of this period are his low reliefs of whitewashed circles and rectangles (e.g., White Relief, 193738). He was coeditor with Naum Gabo and J.L. Martin of Circle, a manifesto published in 1937 to promote Constructivism in England. His later work showed an increasing concern with texture and with simple, isolated representation through silhouette.