Winifred Nicholson’s experimentation years revealed

Paintings by the 20^th century colourist Winifred Nicholson will be on display in a major exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery this summer providing insight into her early years of fast and furious artistic experimentation. ‘Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931’ will include rarely or never seen before oil paintings created by Winifred during her ten year marriage with Ben Nicholson.

Curated by Jovan Nicholson, Winifred and Ben’s Grandson, ‘Art and Life’ includes over 20 of Winifred’s striking still lifes, landscapes and portraits created between 1920 and 1931; years which proved seminal for her artistic development. Winifred experienced a tension between her enjoyment of loosely and generously applied colour and the constraints of the traditional techniques she was taught at the Byam School of Art in London. Meeting Ben in 1920, she found a companion and like-minded partner with whom to share her attempt to distance herself from the tradition within which she had grown up. Cezanne and Picasso were two of the biggest influences on the couple’s artistic output as well as Henri Rousseau’s formal simplification and directness, which Winifred combined with use of bold, concentrated colours, as in Castangola (Red Earth) which receives its first public showing in the show.

Grouped by location, ‘Art and Life’ features several paintings of Cumberland where Winifred lived with Ben, such as Cumberland Landscape, which is displayed for the first time. The couple stayed in London, Lugano, Switzerland and Cornwall and regularly painted and exhibited with their friends and contemporaries Christopher Wood, William Staite Murray and later, Alfred Wallis. Winifred benefited greatly from this life of artistic exchange and Ben’s sense of adventure and his unstoppable desire to see and try new things helping her develop her own response to the modernist revolution. Winifred’s interest in colour, however, did not waver throughout her marriage to Ben, who was more preoccupied with form. The juxtaposition of specific pictures by Ben and Winifred in the exhibition sharing the same colour values shows just how much Winifred led and developed Ben’s sense of colour, for example, Ben’s 1924 (first abstract painting, Chelsea)  and Winifred’s King’s Road, Chelsea.

The beginnings of Winifred’s desire to break away from tradition had already been established during a trip to India in 1919 when her sense of light and colour truly came to life. The exposure to new paintings and traditions gave her valuable insights into the role her fascination with pictorial light could play in infusing spiritual qualities into her work. Flowers were the perfect subject to combine her interest in colour with the aspiration to give the spiritual dimension to her art. Anemones, 1924 receives its first public showing, and is an early example of how Winifred used her favourite magenta pink colour as a highlight to break out all the various yellows into luminosity.

Jovan Nicholson said:

“Winifred used flowers to express her ideas about colour and the exhibition demonstrates how by 1924 she had worked out her fundamental colour theory. Later works in the show highlight the influence of fellow artists - one of my favourite paintings is Boat on a Stormy Sea which Winifred probably painted in St. Ives after she had met the marine painter Alfred Wallis. You sense her delight in the process of painting, with her paint loaded brush whooshing across the surface of the canvas. But it also shows how much she appreciated Wallis with his natural sense of movement. For me it has been an enduring and deepening pleasure to come to know my grandparents work more closely. Most importantly I hope the show will bring much pleasure and enjoyment to the viewers.”

The exhibition is curated by Jovan Nicholson, an Art Historian who has worked on various projects with the Henry Moore Foundation, the Barbican Art Gallery and the Russian Museum, St Petersburg. He is a grandson of Ben and Winifred Nicholson. Loans have been secured from major national collections including Leeds Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, Tate, York Museums Trust, National Gallery of Scotland, Brighton and Hove Museums; and important and rarely seen works from a number of private collections. A major full colour catalogue accompanies the exhibition, comprised of essays by Jovan Nicholson, Sebastiano Barassi and Julian Stair, published by Philip Wilson Publishers.  It will present archival photographs, the majority unpublished and coming from private collections.

Image: Winifred Nicholson, Cyclamen and Primula, c.1922-3, oil on paper / board, 50 x 55 cm, Kettle's Yard / © Kettle's Yard / Trustees of Winifred Nicholson

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