Irresistible vision
Martin Gayford
We often say, rather loosely, that such and such an artist is 'visionary'. But Winifred Nicholson — unlike most of those — actually had visions. When she first encountered her husband-to-be, Ben Nicholson, in 1920 she had a virtually supernatural experience. 'Someone came into the hall . . . I could not see him, I could not hear what he said — I knew in an instant that this was the person I would be marrying. She added, 'The curtained light was grey-blue,' and that is perhaps the point most relevant to her painting, currently on view at this admirable exhibition.
Her work almost never had a mystical subject. But the ordinary things she painted, typically flowers and landscape or the two together, were bathed in a numinous light. That is what gives an air of tender revelation to such early paintings as 'Amy in the Kitchen at Banks Head', or 'Cyclamen and Primula' (1923). It is a feeling that you get from certain other English paintings of the same period, by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, who was a friend of the Nicholsons, Ivon Hitchens, who was a habitué of Banks Head, their house, and David Jones. It is perhaps Jones's watercolour paintings of flowers, of which there is a splendid example in the permanent collection at Kettle's Yard, that come closest to the sense of floral revelation that you get from Winifred Nicholson's best paintings.
They were a generation of British painters in a curious historical backwater. The mainstream of modernism, which had been flowing strongly in London before the first world war, had temporarily dried up. Even those artists who had been most fervently avant-garde — David Bamberg and Wyndham Lewis, for example — tended to associate Cubism and abstraction with the mechanised horrors of the war. Eventually, modernism began advancing again; in the 1930s Ben Nicholson became one of the leaders of a militantly abstract movement in British art.
But for the time being, the Nicholsons and their contemporaries born in the early 1890s — Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer are to an extent similar cases — were suspended in art-historical time. Still connected to the tradition of romanticism, they also had an urge, perhaps also at root romantic, towards a simpler and purer life. Ben Nicholson remarked that he wanted to 'bust up the sophistication all round me', which in artistic terms meant the Edwardian bravura of his father, William Nicholson (who had also acted in an objectionably sophisticated manner by marrying Ben's girlfriend Edie; the marriage to Winifred followed this reverse).
As soon as the Nicholsons settled down in their first house in the Italian lakes, they set about creating interiors with simple furniture and white walls that were the lineal ancestors of the rooms in the house at Kettle's Yard made by their friend and supporter Jim Ede. In painting, the aims were the same: freshness, simplicity, a childlike directness of vision. It can be seen, for example, in the way Winifred's Cumbrian landscape 'The Swaites' (about 1923) echoes naïve or outsider art.
In the early 1920s, you might have thought her the more promising painter of the two. Ben Nicholson, a slow starter, took more time to find his way. Winifred found her true idiom right away. She never did anything better than 'Cyclamen and Primula', which is almost the earliest picture in this show. Most of her finest work belongs to the 1920s, an era when she was evidently extremely happy, living for the most part at Banks Head, a house built over a Roman mile-castle on Hadrian's Wall. This was her ancestral landscape: she came of a grand northern aristocratic family on her mother's side (her grandfather was the Earl of Carlisle).
Even at that stage, there were incipient tensions between the Nicholsons: Ben far preferred London to the country. But there were also the shared joys of parenthood. Winifred gave birth to three children, the first pregnancy described as a 'miracle' by her gynaecologist, in view of her medical history. This event resulted in both the Nicholsons, particularly Winifred, becoming devout Christian Scientists, as it was felt that Christian Scientific attempts to alleviate the barrenness of Paul Nash's wife, Bunty, had become diverted, with this happy result. Visually, the result was 'Starry-Eyed', a painting of Ben holding the new baby, which expresses to perfection the miraculous impression made by a baby on its parents.
In 1930, all this changed for Winifred. Ben met and fell in love with Barbara Hepworth, whom he eventually married after some years in which he oscillated between the two households (this was a great age of the menage a trois in English intellectual circles, almost all of which were doomed to disaster). True to her principles, Winifred attempted to suppress negative feelings about this, and remained close to Ben for the rest of her life (she died in 1981).
But while he moved on into the brave new world of geometric abstract, her attempts to follow were not — as this exhibition demonstrates — terribly successful. She became a good friend of Mondrian's, even suggesting that he move to Cumbria after he fled Paris in 1938; bizarrely, since Mondrian was so averse to the countryside that he even objected to the sight of a tree outside Ben Nicholson's studio — 'Too much nature'.
But abstraction, as Parisian painters such as Jean Helion gently advised, was not really what she was suited to. 'They think,' she wrote, 'it's silly of me to work in the abstract and that I ought to go on in my old way.' Eventually, she took that advice, and continued to have successes in that old way. But most of the best and purest, as is commonly the case with artists we call visionary, came early on. Her art was always, compared to her husband's, a little soft-centred, and hers a smaller talent. But at her best. her vision is irresistible.
The exhibition moves to Graves Art Gallery', Sheffield, from 6 October to 17 November, and Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, from 24 November to 13 January, 2002.
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