ART AND LIFE: 1920-1931

A lively group of young artists – Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis and William Staite Murray, who worked and exhibited together during the 1920s, shared the aim of producing forms of art that were innovative, yet retained distinctly English characteristics.

Bringing together more than 80 of their works from public and private collections, this evocative show is curated by art historian Jovan Nicholson, grandson of Ben and Winifred. The latter met and married in 1920. Winifred established her style considerably earlier than Ben did, as is evident in the brilliant still lifes of flowers that were to become her lifelong trademark. It is also clear, from a series of juxtapositions of their works, that Ben adopted from Winifred the use of bright flashes of colour to enliven his compositions.

The continual interplay in the two artists’ development is explored here through a selection of landscapes, still lifes and portraits. A drawing by Ben and a watercolour by Winifred of a landscape at Tippacott in Devon, viewed from almost identical positions, reveal that the couple sometimes worked literally side by side.

Winifred exhibited in a group show in 1924 that included the potter William Staite Murray. Ben and Winifred saw in Murray a kindred spirit, and they went on to show with him regularly in the years that followed. Some of Murray’s most masterly products from this period punctuate the exhibition.

In 1926, Ben and Winifred encountered another young artist, Christopher Wood, who became their closest friend and collaborator until the end of that decade. In the summer of 1928, all three went to Cornwall together, where Wood painted The Fisherman’s Farewell, a portrait of Winifred, Ben and their first son, Jake.


In St Ives, Ben and Wood came upon Alfred Wallis, a self-taught maritime painter. Wallis had worked as a fisherman, and executed from memory striking images of ships and the sea on rough pieces of cardboard, using marine and household paints. Ben, especially, fell under Wallis’s spell, and did much to help promote Wallis’s work.

A breezy coda to the exhibition is Wallis’s Three Sailing Boats. His dynamic geometry and restricted colour scheme is echoed in Ben’s later work, suggesting that Wallis’s influence persisted even after Ben began to devote himself to the abstract art on which his international reputation now rests.

Until 11 May at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge: 01223-748100, www.kettlesyard.co.uk then from 4 June to 21 September at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London: 020-8693 5254, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk