Ben Nicholson (1894–1982)

The son of artists Sir William Nicholson and Mabel Nicholson (née Pryde), Ben Nicholson was a British painter and maker of reliefs – a pioneer of abstract art in the UK. His early works were mostly still lifes and landscapes, but he began to make abstract works from 1924, partly inspired by the Cubists. He was married firstly to the painter Winifred Nicholson, and later to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (they shared a studio from 1932 and married in 1938).

In the 1930s he became friendly with several leading avant-garde artists, including Mondrian. In 1933 he made his first abstract relief and in 1934 his first strictly geometrical 'white relief' in painted wood. By the late 1930s Nicholson was at the forefront of the modern movement in England. In 1939 he and Hepworth moved to Cornwall, where they became the nucleus of the St Ives School until their divorce in 1951.

In 1958 Nicholson settled in Switzerland with his third wife, the Swiss photographer Felicitas Vogler. After the Second World War he cemented his international reputation, and returned to England in 1971. His late work featured both abstraction and figuration.