Exploring form and colour: British modernism in the 1920s

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Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William Staite Murray influenced and inspired each other, as a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery explores

Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Winifred Roberts (1893–1981) met in the summer of 1920, and before the year was out they were married and had embarked on extremely fruitful careers during which they continually influenced each other. His preoccupation was form and hers was colour, and ‘Art and Life 1920–1931’, curated by their grandson, Jovan Nicholson, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, illustrates how he came to appreciate colour and she to explore form. They were both unusually open to new ideas, from each other and from other artists whom they met and befriended.

Their relationship, both artistic and personal, flourished during the decade of the 1920s. Between their marriage in 1920 and their drifting apart in 1931, they painted in Cornwall and Cumberland, in Greece, Italy, Switzerland and France. Often they were side by side or, on at least one occasion, painting the same vase of flowers from opposite sides. It is fascinating to see how their very different styles and palettes contrasted and coalesced over the years. They added the painters Christopher Wood (1901–30) and Alfred Wallis  (1855–1942) to their circle, and made friends with the ceramics artist William Staite Murray (1881–1962).

Of this group, Wood died by his own hand while still in his 20s and Murray went to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and gave up potting. As young artists, Wood was thought to be very promising and Murray was considered an equal of the ceramicist Bernard Leach (1887–1979), but now they have been eclipsed by artists with longer careers. Alfred Wallis, talented but without formal training, was an influence on the group when they were in Cornwall. Wallis was a much older sailor who had crossed the Atlantic twice in a schooner; his paintings of boats have a particular authenticity in their detail and skill in their sense of movement.

Winifred Nicholson’s trademark scene is a pot or vase of flowers on a windowsill with a landscape beyond. As Sebastiano Barassi remarks in the accompanying catalogue, ‘The pot of flowers wrapped in tissue paper and set on a windowsill was the ideal format to bring together some of Winifred’s favourite themes: the study of luscious colour, the exploration of the relationship between interior and exterior, foreground and background, still life and landscape, and through these the layering and breaking down of the image.’  The colour of flowers, sometimes intense, sometimes more pastel, appealed to her, and in one interesting juxtaposition we have her pale flowers and Ben’s first abstract in 1924, both using the same understated colour scheme.

After they bought a house in Cumberland in 1923, it became their home base. The hills and fells of the Lake District feature in many of their paintings, and another interesting juxtaposition has the same scene rendered by Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, with his darker, muddier, palette. One of the charms of this group is that painting was such a sociable activity for them. Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood often painted together and soon invented a game of seeing who could simplify the lines they were looking at, paring them down until the result was nearly abstract. Nicholson tended to win these little competitions, deleting a tree here, a farmhouse there, so that Christopher Wood’s vision of the same scene seems positively cluttered in comparison.

‘In a sense’, Jovan Nicholson said at the press preview, ‘this whole exhibition leads up to this’, indicating Ben’s white abstract with an incised circle and square.

As a result of all the cross pollination, Winifred’s flowers turn up in Ben’s and Christopher’s paintings; Christopher’s murky landscapes influence Ben’s and Winifred’s; Alfred Wallis’s boats and seascapes appear in pictures by Ben, Winifred, and Christopher; Winifred and Christopher try abstract painting; William Staite Murray throws painterly pots which are incorporated into Ben’s pictures. How far could they have gone with all this? The only thing missing is for them to have adopted a filmmaker who could have recorded them painting and potting in each other’s genres and styles, and they, naturally, would have painted him doing it.

After this productive decade they went their various ways and Ben became more abstract, Winifred branched out into the human form, and Christopher Wood tried Surrealism.

In 1931 Ben left Winifred and their three children and began to live with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. When she gave birth to their triplets in 1934 it seemed time to end his marriage to Winifred, and they were finally divorced four years later. The emotional bond they had enjoyed as husband and wife dissipated, but the bond of art remained, and for the rest of their lives they were in amicable contact and continued to comment on, and be influenced by, each other’s work.  

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains essays by Jovan Nicholson, Sebastiano Barasi, and Julian Stair with 136colour illustrations plus some reproduced snapshots of the period