Two books about Ben Nicholson

 There is a Ben Nicholson on show at the moment in Tate St Ives.

This is what prompted me to read more about him and I found two very different books in the library.

Sarah Jane Checkland wrote ‘Ben Nicholson - the Vicious Circles of his Life and Art’ published 2000.
The title tells her approach and in fact the only photographs included are of people not of the artist’s art.
The author has done extensive research and tells us as much as she can cram in a gossipy journalistic amusing way. 
Ben had a sad childhood and was sent to boarding school.He did not do well at art school.
He was asthmatic so unfit for service in WW1. He married three times and had various lovers, creating triangular relationships that caused Winifred and Barbara a lot of pain, but as the author points out he avoided triangles in his abstract works.
He and Barbara Hepworth formed the Penwith  Society in St Ives which broke away from the St Ives Society in order to promote abstract art.
There are many interesting details about Ben’s life and how abstraction became more popular after WW2, aided by Munnings’ reactionary speech 1949 at the Royal Academy denouncing it as rubbish,  which was  broadcast on the radio. 
By 1950 Nicholson’s work was a global success. He married his third wife, Felicitas Vogler and lived in Switzerland before returning to England.
He was involved  in Christian Science, had some Adlerian psychotherapy sessions, and gave credence to psychic beliefs and astrology.
Overall we get a complex picture of a man who was not very likeable although several women loved him intensely.

In contrast Virginia Button’s ‘Ben Nicholson’2007, in the Tate’s series on British artists, has many coloured photographs of Ben’s work and a narrative stripped back like one of his carefully crafted surfaces. 
Button is far more interested in art than is Checkland, whilst referring to the latter’s book, and gives us more to think about in analysing how Nicholson’s work developed and issues such as truth to materials, political and spiritual connections and how his work fits into art history. Ben responded to Japanese aesthetics and the author finds in his pictures ,which combine references to visually observed landscape and still life combined with abstract form and composition , ’poignant visual poetry. ‘

For clarity and artistic perspective on Ben Nicholson’s work read Virginia Button: for gossip and a critical account of his life it’s Checkland.
In this case the covers sum up the difference.

I saw a retrospective exhibition of Ben Nicholson some years back which showed how clearly he was affected by the work of others, changing his own in response. I thought the period when he was first in love with Barbara Hepworth was the most interesting when his personal life motivated figurative imagery expressed within abstract language - the time from which comes he picture I saw in Tate St Ives.