A Continuous Line
Ben Nicholson in England

7 July - 20 September 2008

An exhibition curated by Chris Stephens, Tate Britain

This summer Abbot Hall will play host to the first major exhibition of Ben Nicholson in the UK for over fourteen years. Curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays at Tate Britain and a leading expert on the art of St Ives from the 1940s-60s, it will focus on the artist’s years in Britain from 1922 to 1958. Past exhibitions have concentrated on Nicholson’s evolution of his international modernist style, and the cool reliefs he produced after he emigrated to Switzerland in 1958. However, this new presentation will highlight those periods that such earlier exhibitions have marginalised. While representing Nicholson’s internationalism, this exhibition will set that wider perspective alongside his approaches to the English landscape, and will reveal a view of Ben Nicholson quite different from the established one.

This exciting project has evolved through a unique collaboration between Tate St Ives, Abbot Hall Art Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, and the exhibition will have its first showing in Kendal from 7 July to 20 September 2008, before travelling to Bexhill at the end of the year, and then to St Ives at the beginning of 2009. However, the exhibition is not simply a touring display in the conventional sense. Crucially, for such a high profile exhibition, it will not have a London showing, and indeed one of the central ideas behind the project is to link the evolution of the exhibition to the regions in which it is to be displayed.

Each of the three venues has a particular relevance to Ben Nicholson: Kendal, of course, is close to the Cumberland home he shared with his first wife; the architecture of the De La Warr Pavilion was the product of the international Modern movement to which he was central; St. Ives was seminal to Nicholson’s art, and his home for nineteen years. Each venue will draw out these regional connections through the exhibition interpretation as well as associated events and activities, and there will be changing archive materials at each venue to create an evolving display which will reach out to local audiences throughout its duration.

Ben Nicholson was one of the most radical British artists of the twentieth century. Forming links with members of the European avant-garde, including Picasso, Braque and Mondrian, he was a pioneer of abstract art in Britain, becoming renowned for his white reliefs of the 1930s which were underpinned by radical socio-political and spiritual beliefs. However he continued to respond to his changing environments, pursuing landscape and still life forms from his early years in Cumberland, where he settled with Winifred Roberts, his first wife, and throughout his time in St. Ives, Cornwall, where he became central to the establishment of the modernist art community alongside his second wife, Barbara Hepworth.

The exhibition will begin by looking at the landscapes of the 1920s, including works painted in Cumberland where he lived with his first wife, the painter Winifred Robertsl. After marrying in 1920, the couple spent several winters to the Ticino region of southern Switzerland, and the earliest picture in the exhibition is Nicholson’s landscape painting, c.1921-23 (Cortivallo, Lugano), which is regarded as his first accomplished work and demonstrates the strong influence of Cézanne as well as the simplicity and light of the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. Often stopping off in Paris on their way to and from their holiday home, the couple admired the work of modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, and Nicholson painted his first abstract paintings during this period, although it wasn’t until the early 1930s that he began to explore Cubist compositions in earnest.

In 1923 the Nicholsons a farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall overlooking the Irthing Valley, and thereafter he worked between Cumberland and London, where his work was beginning to draw attention. Typical of his work of the 1920s are his still life and landscape subjects painted in a naïve style, often characterised by a simplification of forms and colours, as seen in the painting 1928 (foothills, Cumberland). During this time he was also inspired by his friend Christopher Wood’s technique of using household paint as an undercoat, and then scraping, rubbing and incising the surface to reveal the white ground, giving the picture surface a worn effect. Travelling to Cornwall with Wood, the two artists discovered the ‘primitive’ painter Alfred Wallis, whose paintings of boats and seascapes were also vital in influencing Nicholson’s approach to composition.

The 1930s saw a new direction in Nicholson’s art, and the exhibition will present a series of works charting his development of a totally non-representational art. In 1931 he met the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, whom he would later marry, and by the following year they were living and working together in her Hampstead studio. In 1932, they visited the Paris studios of Brancusi, Arp and Braque, inspiring Nicholson’s first abstract reliefs of circles and rectangles carved into board, which were followed soon after by the series of White Reliefs. Later in the same decade, he introduced colour to his reliefs and abstract paintings, betraying the example of Mondrian.

The exhibition will continue throughout Nicholson’s time in St. Ives, Cornwall during World War II, where his abstract and landscape works became central to the establishment of the modernist art community, alongside his second wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. In St. Ives he returned to nature, reinterpreting the landscape in works drawn and painted from windows where he could overlook harbours, coastal landscapes and rooftops. In 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall), Nicholson employs a Cubist-inspired treatment, combining the exterior vista with an internal still life grouping. The final section of the exhibition focuses on the Cubist still life compositions made between 1945 and 1958, in which objects are drawn with flat outlines and arranged as overlapping planes. The exhibition will also be interjected throughout with landscape and nude drawings from across Nicholson’s career, demonstrating the continuity of vision and approach underlying what might appear a diverse selection.

Drawing on Tate’s extensive holdings of Ben Nicholson’s drawings, paintings and carved reliefs, as well as archive material, the exhibition will also include important loans from major public institutions in the UK. However, many of Nicholson’s finest works remain in private collections, and a large number of these rarely-seen works will be shown. A colour-illustrated 128 page catalogue to accompany the project will be published by Tate Publishing with essays by Chris Stephens, Margaret Garlake (independent art historian, former Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art) and Ysanne Holt, (Lecturer in History of Art at Northumbria University and Editor of the journal of Visual Culture in Britain). The final section of the book will draw on archive material from Tate’s comprehensive collection to produce an illustrated chronology of Nicholson’s life.

Lecture: Ben Nicholson by Chris Stephens
Thursday 11th September 6.30pm for 7.00pm £7.50
(includes a glass of wine)

Chris Stephens will address the key themes of the exhibition at Abbot Hall which repositions Ben Nicholson as more than simply the leading British figure in the international abstract movement.

Chris Stephens is Head of Displays at Tate Britain and a specialist in modern art with a particular interest in the art of St Ives. Past projects include exhibitions at Tate St Ives of Bryan Wynter, Barbara Hepworth and Roger Hilton; at Tate Britain of ‘Art and the 60s’ and Gwen and Augustus John. He has also published widely in the same areas and is currently working on exhibitions of Francis Bacon (2008) and Henry Moore (2010) for Tate Britain, and a critical history of art in St Ives.

Tickets can be booked by telephone: 01539 722464