Ben Nicholson, August 1956 (Val d'Orcia), 1956, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholoson, 1935 (white relief) 1935, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholson, 1921 – circa 1923 (Cortivallo, Lugano), 1921-c1923, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholson, 1934 (relief), 1934, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholson, 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall), 1943-45, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholson, 1928 (foothills, Cumberland), 1928, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Ben Nicholson, 1924 (first abstract painting, Chelsea), c1923-4, © The Estate of Ben Nicholson. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2002.

Tate St. Ives
Porthmeor Beach
St. Ives
Cornwall
01736 796226
Ben Nicholson
A Continuous Line
24 January-4 May 2009

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was one of the most radical British artists of the 20th century. This will be the first major presentation of the work of Nicholson in the UK for over 14 years. The exhibition reconsiders his position in British art history offering a new understanding of the modern in art, particularly in relation to national and local identities. Focusing on Nicholson's English years, the three principal sections: Landscapes of the late 1920s; Abstract and landscape works made in St Ives during World War II and the Cubist still-lifes made between 1945-58, draw on a selection of key works to demonstrate his continuity of vision and approach.

This major touring project has been developed collaboratively between Tate St Ives, Abbot Hall in Kendal, Cumbria and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, It has been curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays at Tate Britain and a leading expert on the art of St Ives from the 1940s-60s. Each of the three venues has a particular relevance to Ben Nicholson: Kendal is close to the home he shared with his first wife; 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 19 years.

Nicholson is best known as a leading figure of the Modern Movement in Britain in the 1930s. His abstract paintings and reliefs secured his reputation alongside such international collaborators as Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and Russian sculptor Naum Gabo.

A Continuous Line looks at Nicholson's work from the beginning of his mature career in the early 1920s to 1958 when the artist left Britain for Switzerland. In contrast to previous exhibitions, it pays special attention to his non-abstract work of the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s, speculating on differing ideas of the modern in painting.

In the wake of the first world war and during the second world war, Nicholson's art proposed a new way of thinking about the world, including a re-engagement with nature and tradition. This can be seen in his landscapes of this time and in his gently worked surface textures, which might be seen as modern in more subtle ways than his more obviously radical abstracts.

This is the first major presentation of Nicholson's work in the UK for over 14 years. The project has been organised by Tate St Ives in collaboration with Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal and De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. With each venue connecting with an aspect of his life and work, the exhibition completes its 10 month national tour in St Ives, a place seminal to Nicholson's art and his home for 19 years.

In the early 1920s, Nicholson abandoned the dark realism he had inherited from his father, the successful Edwardian painter William Nicholson. He experimented with cruder, less polished forms of representation. From landscape and still-life subjects he abstracted formal compositions until, in 1924, he made a few totally non-representational paintings. In fact, even these derived from still-life arrangements. They were short-lived.

In 1923 Nicholson and his first wife, Winifred, acquired a house in Cumberland. The landscape there became a major preoccupation. By 1928 he achieved a faux-naïve style which was validated that summer when he encountered the self-taught, amateur painter Alfred Wallis in St Ives in Cornwall.

For several years paintings of the northern border country and its white-painted farms were interspersed with Cornish sea views; Wallis-like ships taking the place of the Cumberland horses. Just as Wallis's paintings were seen as evidence of an innocent and authentic vision, so these simple landscapes might stand for a yearning for a lost rustic simplicity.

Nicholson’s work changed dramatically after 1931 when he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, whom he would later marry. He celebrated their relationship in a series of paintings.

The year 1933 was one of particularly rapid development. The idea of the painting as a three-dimensional object was increasingly important and the year culminated in his first carved reliefs.

Nicholson's major breakthrough came in 1934 with his white reliefs, from which all colour was banished. He continued to produce these alongside severely abstract paintings until the end of the 1930s. The whiteness stood for modernity and new ideas of spirituality. The reliefs' textured surfaces, meanwhile, continued to invoke a rural tradition of hand-made practices.

Nicholson's drawing style changed little between the 1920s and early 1950s. He used a strong, continuous line and a minimum of shading. Highly-simplified landscape compositions are punctuated with closely-observed, often whimsical details. The dominant line unites these foreground incidents with the background so that the space seems to be flattened out. In this way the drawings themselves provide a continuous line running through periods of apparently quite different work.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Nicholson and his family left London for Cornwall. He immediately returned to landscape subjects and to memories of his visit to St Ives in 1928.

At the same time Nicholson continued to make uncompromisingly abstract paintings. Indeed, he began to produce numerous versions, in different sizes, of the same composition. The apparent impersonality of these was countered by the gently worked surfaces of the painted reliefs that he made from 1941, which often incorporated colours drawn from his nature.

Towards the end of the war, from 1943, abstract and representational aspects and the continued attention to a painting’s surface quality came together in still lifes on window sills.

After the second world war, Nicholson's art was dominated by still life paintings, sometimes with the subject set against a landscape.

The fragmented, abstracted forms are drawn and painted over subtly-worked, textured grounds. To create these grounds Nicholson would repeatedly apply and rub off paint, revealing a variety of layers of colour. Continuing his lifelong fascination with surface texture, these grounds were compared to the wind- and sea-worn rocks of Cornwall. He compared the laborious scraping that produced them to his mother's scrubbing of the kitchen table.

Once he left Britain for Switzerland, Nicholson continued with his scraped surfaces but abandoned subject matter for a return to reliefs.