Ben and Winifred Nicholson: Art and Life 1920-1931 at Ways With Words, Dartington.

Jovan Nicholson gave a talk about his grandparents Winifred and Ben Nicholson as part of the Dartington Ways With Words Festival in July this year. He has curated an exhibition of their work, Art and Life 1920-1931, which is currently on display at the Dulwich Pictuer Gallery in London. The show also incorporates three other artists with whom the Nicholsons were close in the 1920s and early 30s: Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William State Murray. Nicholson was particularly enthusiastic about his inclusion of the latter. He hopes that this renewed exposure will go some way towards reviving the reputation of a potter whom he feels was one of the finest exponents of the art in Britain in the twentieth century, quite the equal of his contemporary Bernard Leach.

Ben and Winifred Nicholson in 1923

Nicholson’s approach to his subjects in the exhibition and the accompanying book is a comparitive one, and this was the approach he took in the talk as well. He set particular works alongside each other, and thereby illustrated ho the artists influenced and inspired one another. They sometimes painted or drew the same landscapes in their own individual manner, initial similarities gradually diverging significantly as they established their signature styles and outlooks. Ben’s pencil sketch and Winifred’s watercolour of a rural hillside scene at Tippacott in Devon, where they went in 1920 just before their marriage (in fact, they got engaged during this trip), show a congruent, straightforwardly representational approach to the view. Trees, hedgerows and hillcrest contours are all present and relatively proportional in both pictures. At this formative point in their artistic development, their way of seeing the world was largely convergent. Later, and speaking in a broadly general sense. Jovan outlined the way in which their work would diverge: Winifred would concentrate more on colour, and Ben on form.

Winifred found her metier early on, painting some of her first threshold flowers in 1921, the painting Polyanthus and Cineraria being a good example. Its bright contrasts pointed to her future explorations of colour combinations, whilst the undulant brushstroke of blues above the brown flowers on the left side of the vase anticipates in abbreviated form the exuberant, canvas wide waves of her 1928 St Ives painting Boat on a Stormy Sea. Jovan drew attention to the metaphysical and symbolic elements of Winifred’s principal subject matter. The division between domestic interior and exterior landscape, with the nurtured blend of floral colours (and the stable forms of the vases, jugs or glasses from which they emerge) placed in between, represent the conscious act of seeing, of intense, aware vision.

Winifred's Chelsea roofscape on the cover of Christopher Andreae's book

Ben took longer to explore and develop his feel for austere, simplified form, which eventually led him towards total abstraction. An early abstract painting from 1924 was shown here, but it was a tentative experiment which didn’t immediately lead anywhere. It was held back and worked on over a long period of time. It derived from a collage, and the ragged edges and superimposed rectilinear shapes were faithfully reproduced; in its own way, a piece of representational art. Jovan’s comparison with Winifred’s window-framed 1925 roofscape, Kings Road, Chelsea, painted from the same Chelsea studio in which this work was created, led you to see a similar arrangement of chimneys, brickwork, sloping roofs and squares of sky in Ben’s abstract.

Slides were shown in carefully chosen pairs, projected onto the white plaster wall of Dartington Hall, above the large mouth of the fireplace. This provided an interesting and generally highly appropriate additional element of medieval texture. Ben Nicholson’s 1925 still life Jamaique was shown alongside Winifred’s Flowers in a Glass Jar from the same year. It amply served to demonstrate how far they had diverged in their approaches by this point. But Jovan pointed out the clear correlation between the pink pentagonal base on which Ben set his flattened objects and the pink which Winifred used for the principal flowers in her composition. William Staite Murray’s elegantly shaped bowls, pots and vases with their boldly imaginative patterning and painted designs, and the unconventionally shaped boards which Alfred Wallis used, which often guided the compositional form of his paintings, were shown to have inspired Ben to be daring and intuitive in his own explorations of form. His instinct towards reduction, a preference for simplicity and a stripping away of extraneous detail, was encouraged by his exposure to Wallis’ work. The extent to which he began following through on this instinct was seen in the two drawings of the same Cumberland landscape made by Ben and Christopher Wood on a sketching trip they made together in 1928. Wood’s depiction of the scene is full, depicting all the elements he saw before him: outlined trees, a farmhouse, a river, a shaded hillside horizon line and a chimney smoke haze. It pointed to a richly detailed landscape which might later be produced. Ben, on the other hand, leaves wide expanses of empty space, with a few boldly outlined trees scattered singly or in tight clusters and the outline of the River Irthing sharply curving across the flattened foreground. The horizon is marked by a single lollipop-shaped tree, a darkly shaded marker beacon. The farmhouse has completely vanished, surplus to compositional requirements. Ben was now transforming what he saw to conform with his own rigorous artistic vision.

Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight - Winifred Nicholson

Jovan talked about the work rather than the lives of his grandparents. Personal touches did come through, however. He confessed that he found it almost impossible to rad the recriminating letters they wrote to each other when the marriage was falling apart in the early 30s. Winifred’s 1931-2 painting Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight, depicting two of their three children sitting at the table of the house she had rented at Fishbourne for the winter, dates from the period of their separation, after Ben had gone to live with Barbara Hepworth. Jake and Kate wear party hats, which suggests it might be Christmas. But as Jovan pointed out, they look bewildered and lost rather than excited. The disjuncture between the light colours and carnival hats and the children’s sombre faces is very poignant. Jovan evidently felt an empathetic connection with them as he described their expressions. ‘The one on the left is my father’ he added, almost incidentally.

He also showed his steel when a questioner at the end implied that there might have been an element of exploitation in Ben’s relationship with Alfred Wallis, and that he made a healthy profit from selling his paintings on to London dealers. Jovan took a deep breath before replying, paused significantly and acidly thanked the person in question for giving him the opportunity to put such myths to rest, which he proceeded to do with thoroughness and conviction. His grandfather’s honour was vigorously defended, and Wallis depicted as a sharp, highly self-aware individual. Not the sort to allow themselves to be exploited by anyone. He firmly stated that he had found no evidence of Ben ever selling any of the Wallis paintings that he had bought. Rather, he donated a good many to a wide variety of galleries and museums. This, together with his tireless promotion of Wallis’ work, raised (and indeed initially created) Wallis’ profile in the eyes of the metropolitan art world, and brought people to his door in St Ives, generating many commissions. For this, he was vocally grateful, and Jovan told us that he loved the attention which he received as a result.

He also countered the general perception that Ben could be doctrinaire and hardline in his promulgation of the artistic school of thought he happened to favour, his work ascetic and forbidding as a result. He emphasised the humour he found in his work. The trompe l’oeil play with perspective in his 1925 Still Life With Jug, Mugs, Cup and Goblet, for example, the white goblet on the left being simultaneously in front of and behind the adjacent slate grey vase. His animals display a certain childlike delight, too. Jovan found this sense of ‘fun’ in Wallis’ work, as well. The parallel array of pyramidal sails and icebergs in Schooner and Icebergs (1928) was highlighted as an example of Wallis’ lightness and humour.

Poster for the Kettle's Yard showing of Art and Life, with Ben Nicholson's Jamaique

He was also fulsome in his praise for Jim Ede, the former Tate Gallery curator who set up home in four converted cottages in Kettles Yard, Cambridge in the 50s. He was also a long-term supporter of Wallis, and of Ben and Winifred. Kettles Yard housed a good number of their works which he had bought for his own collection. It still does to this day, as a wonderfully atmospheric house and gallery, the paintings and drawings taking their place amongst aesthetically arranged domestic objects and fittings (Wallises in the bathroom, Nicholsons above the bed). His use of the familiar diminutive ‘Kit’ when referring to Christopher Wood suggested a feeling of personal connection here, too.

Wood’s ravishingly sensual portrait of the aristocratic Russian émigré Frosca Munster, The Blue Necklace (1928) paints a picture of an emotionally complex man, as Jovan explained. Letters between the two, and from Winifred to Frosca, made the depths of Kit’s feeling for her plain. Her departure from Cornwall, and the British Isles, was almost certainly precipitated by her becoming pregnant by him, and he was left bereft by her sudden absence from his life. His primarily gay sexuality was frankly expressed in the 1930 interior Nude Boy in a Bedroom, which Jovan also showed us. It has a casual, relaxed sense of intimacy, with the subject half-turned away from our (and the artist’s) view as he dries himself with a towel. Picture cards are scattered on the bed as if they’d just been studied (the boy is looking at another small reproduction on the wall) and the shutters are half closed, letting in light whilst maintaining a sense of a private domestic world.

Christopher Wood - Zebra and Parachute

Jovan showed us the last painting Wood finished before his suicide in 1930, Zebra and Parachute. The stark, white lines and masses of the modernist architecture in front of which the passive body of the zebra is posed have echoes of the white reliefs which Ben would produce in the mid-30s. They also anticipate Berthold Lubetkin’s introduction of European International Style modernism to London Zoo (and England) in 1933-4 via the gorilla house and penguin pool he designed for Tecton. But the hanged man limply suspended beneath the bright colours of the parachute in the background, along with the incongruously exotic creature in the foreground, hint at a possible turn towards surrealism belying the ascetic modernist backdrop. This would certainly have put him at artistic odds with Ben, widening the personal rift which his heavy use of opium had already opened up.

The period whose end was so tragically and drastically underlined by Wood’s death, and soon after by the break up of the Nicholsons’ marriage, saw the group of friends and compatriots who had been so close in the 1920s drift apart both personally and in terms of artistic style and intent. But during that intense decade during which they shared each other’s thoughts, homes and paints, they left a lasting mark on each other which continued to make itself felt in their work. The 20s were the years in which the seeds were sown, and the enriching cross-fertilisation took place. Jovan Nicholson’s talk, his book and the exhibition which he has curated ably and definitively traces the streams of influence and inspiration which flowed between them, and which kept them invisibly connected throughout their lives, no matter how far their outlook diverged, or how strongly their opinions were expressed. Some things just can’t be broken.

Art Holiday - Part Two

Kettles Yard in Cambridge is a small gallery and house just outside the centre of the city. The house was knocked together from three old cottages, with a further extension added later, by the art collector and former curator of the Tate Jim Ede. He lived here with his wife Helen from 1958 to 1973. His art collection hung upon the walls, part of the usual furnishings and objects of daily life. The house was opened as a gallery whilst they still lived there and remained as it was after they had moved out. It offers a unique opportunity to view works of 20th century art in a sympathetic domestic setting. The abstract works, in particular, seem to really gain from being juxtaposed against the domestic objects and ornaments, which are in themselves often things of beauty. The spiral of pebbles on the circular wooden table, graded according to a chiaroscuro scale of grey, have been adopted as a kind of house logo. The adjoining purpose built gallery shows temporary exhibitions, some retrospective and some by contemporary artists, as well as hosting concerts of chamber music and jazz.


We’ve been here on many occasions, but this time the current exhibition followed through on its promise to turn things ‘Upside Down/Inside Out’. The house where Ede’s collection normally hangs was given over to ‘interventions’ by artists who had exhibited over the past 14 years, thus giving it something of a ‘best of’ flavour. This idea was particularly effective if you were familiar with the usual arrangement of the contents of the house, as these changes disrupted the experience to which you’d grown accustomed, making you look afresh at objects and spaces which you may otherwise have ignored through casual recognition. The house is well known for the way the light pours in and plays over its objects and furnishings throughout the day. Kathryn Faulkner makes use of this by creating images on photographic paper imprinted by the spectral shadows thrown by sunlight through various glass objects. Literal impressions of light. Judith Goddard put up a fixed door of transparent Perspex barring entrance to Helen Ede’s old bedroom, and set up a security camera inside to sweep it eye across the enclosed space. The slowly moving image could be watched on a tv screen set up on a chest of drawers. Its clinical digital picture seemed both somehow more sharply real and less present than the actual space it reproduced. You half expected to see a digital HD spectre walk across the screen, reluctantly reconfigured from the past and reduced to a diminished virtual existence; a gigabyte ghost. It reminded me of Gwen John’s Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, with its empty chair by an open window, and I found its similar record of absence extremely moving.

The table where the radio sat

My favourite piece was probably David Sheppard’s interactive sound art object, a re-tooled old wooden radio from the pre-transistor age. This allowed you to create your own live mix of music by manipulating the three control knobs for band, volume and tuning, which gave access to different sounds, rhythms and pitch variations. Both Stockhausen and John Cage had incorporated the spontaneous sounds of tuned radios into their music, so this was perhaps a nod to their memory. In any case, it was great DIY avant-garde composition fun.


The walls of Kettles Yard are painted white, the better to reflect the shifting shadows cast as the sun measures out the hours of the day. Michael Craig-Martin’s painting of one alcove room in a violent shade of magenta was thus particularly startling, and difficult to ignore. He had removed all the furniture whilst he redecorated, replacing it all again in exactly the same place, save for one chair, which he painted in relief outline on the wall. His intervention was perversely effective for being so wholly out of character with the rest of the house, and for being hidden in a well chosen nook which meant that you came across it unexpectedly.


Along the lengthy gallery of the extension, Douglas Allsop had strung his ‘Blind Screen’, fashioned from lengths of video tape. These shimmered gently in the breeze, which I admit was caused by my blowing on them. The use of what is now an all but redundant recording medium as the material for this installation could have been just another piece of weakly punning conceptual art, but its shiny, shimmering and inherently fragile surfaces made it visually appealing in itself. The mystery of what further images were locked into its magnetic depths merely added to its allure. Just opposite, Mary Lemley had set up a small monitor atop an empty glass-fronted cabinet, which slowly reeled through photographs of every object in her house. This was interesting enough for a while, particularly in the juxtapositions it threw up between, say, an art book and a more practical item such as a mug. It did seem a bit redolent of the ‘let’s look at me’ art of recent times which reflects or perhaps just seeks to be a part of the modern malaise of celebritocracy.

David Jones, Vexilla Regis (1947-8)

The converse side of this disruption of the normal display in the house was the use of the gallery for pictures which had been displaced, alongside further works not normally on show. This was a good opportunity to see these displayed in a more conventional gallery space, and grouped together by artist. There were several prints and etchings by David Jones, including his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was interesting to mentally compare with those of Mervyn Peake and Gustav Dore. Also on display was his Vexilla Regis from 1947, one of my favourite Kettles Yard paintings. This is a complex interweaving of Roman and Celtic landscapes with a plethora of pagan Christian symbolism. There are Roman temples and what looks like a statue of Diana in a woodland grove alongside a stone circle and a Glastonbury-like mount. The three trees in the foreground, one topped with a Roman legionary eagle, are the trees of Calvary, the foremost of which has flowered into a riot of life at its crown. It is a wonderful picture which really needs to be seen close up to appreciate its dense detail. You can imagine Jones himself, his eyesight failing, leaning close to the surface of the paper to create these thickets of tangled symbolism. It was probably actually better seeing it in this context than in its usual position in the house, where the confined space and domestic furnishings militate against a closer and more detailed inspection.

Elizabeth Vellacott, Bare Trees and Hills (1960) in the house

Winifred Nicholson, Primula and Cyclamen (1923)

Jones worked at least partly in pencil, and there were also several beautiful works in pencil by Elizabeth Vellacott, whose depiction of trees is particularly fine. She somehow manages to convey the mysterious haze which hangs silently over some afternoons. The musical equivalent would by Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, in whose particulate layers of drift you can almost synaesthetically see the dancing motes of dust in beams of sunlight. Winifred Nicholson was represented by one of her many flower paintings and by a seascape of paradoxical solidity. The flower paintings always seem to convey the idea of some kind of threshold. The flowers on the windowsill and the landscape beyond suggest a boundary between inner and outer worlds, of ordered experience and unmediated nature. The flowers themselves, contained in vases, bottles or jugs, positioned on this threshold, are somewhere in between. Their subtly variegated colours could act as a symbol of the act of vision with which we perceive and interpret the world, and of the inner eye through which the artist seeks to transform it in order to express some underlying essence. Nicholson would, in later life, experiment with the use of prisms on the windowsill in order to split light into its spectrum, cracking it open to reveal and examine its contents.

Ben Nicholson, Christmas Night (1930)

Ben Nicholson, at one time married to Winifred and later to sculptor Barbara Hepworth, is represented by abstract work which is more in line with European and Russian currents of modernism and constructivism. But there is also an earlier work from 1930, a domestic interior of his bedroom at night. Painted at a time when his life was in a state of transition, having left Winifred and his children, it has a rather melancholy feel of loneliness. His monogrammed brush set takes on a monumental presence in the emptiness of the room, his occupation of what would traditionally have been considered a primarily female space serving to emphasise his solitude. Outside, the church is swallowed by the darkness, and a horse (or a donkey?) looks longingly in at the light of the domestic interior from which it is excluded. The viewer’s perspective is from the interior of the room, but the curtain is drawn back to frame a wide expanse of the winter night. The depths of this cold darkness threaten to engulf the fragile comforts of the home.

Christopher Wood, Building the Boat, Treboul, 1930

Another Kettles Yard artist featured in the gallery, a friend of both the Edes and the Nicholsons, was Christopher Wood. His Building the Boat, Treboul from 1930 is very familiar from its customary position in the house, and was one of many pictures painted during his stay on the Breton coast. The half-built boat resembles the beached skeletal ribcage of a beached whale, the woman in the foreground sadly cradling a plank of wood as if she is carrying away a relic. The painting seems haunted by death, although this maybe a judgement influenced by the knowledge of Wood’s own tragic passing shortly thereafter.

Christopher Wood, Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat (1926)

Wood was born in Liverpool, but took the traditional artist’s passage over the channel to France, and it was here that he established himself in the fevered atmosphere of the golden age, the ‘harlequin years’ of Paris in the 20s. The portrait ‘Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat’ is of one of the young men in Jean Cocteau’s circle. Wood himself shared a studio with Cocteau in 1924/5, and it was through him that he met Jean and Jeanne Bourgoint, a brother and sister with a very close bond. They were to become the models for the central characters of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, later filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Wood’s full length portrait depicts Jean as frankly sensuous, with his relaxed, crossed-ankle posture, red lips and blue-eyed gaze. This sensuality is further reflected in the Persian cat which he strokes, and which shares his blue eyes. The cats claws are spread out and digging into his leg, however. Maybe Wood is alluding to a vicious and parasitical side to his charms, of which he is all-too conscious. He is like the cat in that he expects to be taken in, fed and loved but feels under no obligation to give anything in return. There may even be an element of jealousy here, Wood digging in his own catty claw. The rumours amongst Cocteau’s gossipy hangers-on were that he was now favouring Jean over Wood. The visible fragments of sketches in the background of the painting suggest that Wood abandoned it before applying the finishing touches, perhaps tiring of the subject and of the Parisian demi-monde in general. What remains, however, is the perfect portrait of the gilded and offhandedly destructive youth of the period. Sadly, it was during this period that Wood, and Jean’s sister Jeanne, picked up and addiction to Cocteau’s drug of choice, opium (and Cocteau has, fairly or unfairly, been accused of wrecking a succession of lives at this time). Neither was able to shake their addiction, and both ended up committing suicide, Wood beneath the wheels of a train at Salisbury station.

Alfred Wallis, Boats Before a Great Bridge (c.1935-7)

When living in St Ives, Wood became friends with the ‘naïve’ artist Alfred Wallis, moving into a house a few doors away from him. Many of Wallis’ paintings, confined by the space of the scraps of card or packing-case wood which he used as canvasses, can be found in the upper gallery of the house extension, and several made it into the gallery exhibition too. Wallis intuitively reached some of the same compositional distortions of perspective which modern artists were adopting, the flattening out into clearly separated blocks and shapes of colour, perhaps making a virtue out of technical limitations. Both Wood and Ben Nicholson, and through them others, took inspiration from him and his untutored and thus, to them, somehow purer eye. Wallis made the break with tradition that they were seeking by virtue of being unencumbered by knowledge of it. The fact that he was a retired man (an ex-fisherman) who painted out of personal need rather than with a commercial imperative made him all the more appealing.

Jim Ede at Kettles Yard

Wallis is now seen as an important, if eccentric, English (Cornish, if you prefer) artist, largely, but not solely, for his influence on others. It is interesting to speculate as to how others like him have existed in parallel with the recognised figures of art history, their work lacking the patronage of well-placed artists which Wallis’ received and destined for the bonfire after their deaths. There is something very satisfying about seeing these vivid paintings on their scraps of discarded packaging hanging on the whitewashed walls of a modern gallery. No conceptual commentary behind the use of material, it was just what lay to hand. They are so very far from a small Cornish fishing village at the corner of the country, and also from the commodified ArtWorld ™ which often seems to exist largely to reflect upon itself and its market processes. The exhibition, and Kettles Yard in general, serve to remind us of some great British artists, but also that they didn’t exist in isolation. Their work may have been distinctively British, but it was also fully aware of and had strong links with the European movements. This is no little Englander art. Ultimately this is a place which retains the atmosphere of a home, and as such is a tribute to the openness and generosity of Jim and Helen Ede, who did so much to accommodate and encourage the artists who were also often their friends.