Art: Beginning with Billiards

When he chooses, Ben Nicholson paints charming and recognizable still lifes and landscapes. He doesn’t always choose. He also happens to be Britain’s most revered abstractionist. For conservatives, there’s the rub. In a book on Nicholson newly published in England, Art Critic Herbert Read rubs it in. You can’t admire the still lifes and abhor the abstractions, admonishes Read, “without confessing to a prejudice that has nothing to do with the essential qualities of art.”

Whether a confession of prejudice is required or not, most laymen will probably go on preferring Nicholson’s more representational paintings. His paper-thin, impeccably tasteful abstractions strike some onlookers as a game of solitaire played with illegible cards. And to them, his geometrical bas-reliefs look as blandly uncommunicative as a ouija board.

But the cult of Nicholson-worshippers, which has been growing in England in recent years, insists on regarding his art as the work of a brilliant mathematician or a deep metaphysical thinker. Nicholson himself takes a simpler view. “People are too sophisticated about art,” he told a correspondent last week. “They look for hidden meanings. The fact is my six children laugh at my knowledge of mathematics and I know nothing at all about metaphysics. A painter should paint, not theorize. Of course,” he added with a twinkle, “it’s extremely interesting when a really intelligent man comes along and explains to you what you’ve been doing.”

At 54, Nicholson looks rather like a smaller and more delicate Picasso—as does some of his work. He lives with his wife, Sculptor Barbara Hepworth, in a grey, gabled house on the Cornish coast, and does his painting in a small, tidy studio upstairs.

The son of a meticulous portrait painter,* Nicholson spent his art-student days “mostly playing billiards,” which might possibly have stimulated his liking for abstract forms in space. He turned to abstraction bit by bit, still can’t explain how it happened. Said he: “It’s like a child learning to walk. By the time you’ve reached the 50th step you can’t describe the different stages.”

*With a very British sense of humor. When a distinguished bore came to lunch and was in full drone, Sir William Nicholson would give a signal, whereupon the whole family would jump up, dash madly around the table, and plump down again in their seats as if nothing had happened.