with Kunsthalle Bern;
with Grosvenor Gallery, London;
with Galleria de’Foscherari, Bologna;
with Galerie Melki, Paris;
W. Staite Murray, 1955
Exhibition History:
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, Paintings by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, April – May 1927;
Turin, Galleria Gissi, Maestri Stranieri Contemporanei (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 3065);
London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Art & Life: 1920-1931 – Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis & William Staite Murray, 4 June – 21 September 2014. This exhibition travelled to Leeds Museums and Galleries, 18 October 2013 – 12 January 2014, and Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, 15 February – 11 May 2014;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Road to Abstraction, 21 May – 24 July 2016;
London, Business Design Centre, London Art Fair Museum Partner, Ten Years – A Century of Art, 18 – 22 January 2017;
Woking, The Lightbox, Is there still life in Still Life? 15 July – 1 October 2017;
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Land | Sea | Life: A British Art Collection, 20 October 2017 – 17 February 2018;
Woking, The Lightbox, The St Ives School, 6 April – 23 June 2019;
Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change, 17 August 2019 – 5 January 2020;
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, Ben Nicholson: From the Studio, 26 June – 24 October 2021
Literature:
Herbert Read (intro.), Ben Nicholson: Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings, Vol. 1, Lund Humphries, London, 1955 (illustrated, no.13);
Jovan Nicholson, Art and Life 1920-1931, London, 2013 (illustrated, p. 82)
Ben Nicholson was the son of the artists William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde. Nicholson’s early works were strongly influenced by his father’s still lifes. However, by the 1930s he was moving towards complete abstraction, influenced by the work of his second wife, Barbara Hepworth, and inspired by his trips to Paris and the studios of Picasso, Braque, Brâncusi and Mondrian. This work, painted in 1926, shows the artist in transition. It is a painting of still-recognisable objects, and although the perspective has been flattened and the shapes simplified, the artist has not yet reached the pure geometric forms of his later work.
)
