BOOKS
Casting a cold eye
Richard Shone
BEN NICHOLSON: THE VICIOUS CIRCLES OF HIS LIFE AND ART by Sarah Jane Checkland John Murray, £25, pp. 486 The preface and acknowledgments to this first biography of Ben Nicholson, who died in 1982, include a scarcely veiled attack on the painter's family and executors for their refusal to co-operate with the author. Not only are there no quotations from the scores of letters from Nicholson to his first and second wives, Winifred Nicholson, née Roberts, and Barbara Hep- worth, but there are no reproductions of the artist's work among the illustrations (hence the pastiche Nicholson on the jack- et). Other permissions were withheld and certain key witnesses stayed silent. While some may condemn Nicholson's heirs for this implacable opposition, others will sure- ly agree, once they have read the book, that they were right to hold out against the author. The matter is complicated by the fact that Sir Alan Bowness, husband of Sarah, the daughter of Nicholson and Hep- worth, has executive powers ranging over his in-laws' estates though not over the bulk of Nicholson's papers and letters held in the Tate Gallery Archive, over which the Tate has jurisdiction. And Leslie Wadding- ton, the artist's last dealer, oversees the copyright in the reproduction of Nichol- son's work. Bowness himself has long been engaged on a book on Hepworth (hence the incomplete nature of Sally Festing's 1995 biography of the sculptor). Children and grandchildren have taken one side or the other.
I think the family was fearful for the pre- sent project on several counts. If Sarah Jane Checkland had been given carte blanche, not only would it have pre-empted Bowness's own work but it would have flown in the face of Nicholson's and Hep- worth's expressed wishes: the former want- ed no biography, the latter asked her son-in-law to write hers. I am sure it was from no particular desire to keep family linen clean or lock skeletons safely in the cupboard that the book was not given their blessing. No, the problem lay with Check- land whose reputation, such as it was, had gone before her. She seemed ideally unqualified to shoulder the task of portraying the work and world of this out- standing artist. Having known Checkland's journalism for some years in the Times and elsewhere, I concluded that she had little understand- ing of art and even less love for it. I thought she would eventually move on from reporting the art market to other assignments — the motoring or animal wel- fare columns perhaps. I was not the only one to be amazed when I heard she was devoting her energies to Ben Nicholson, a rigorous pioneer of pure abstraction as well Ben Nicholson in the 1960s as a painter of 'figurative' works of the utmost sensibility. The disdain Checkland showed in her reporting of contemporary art did not suggest she would be the most sympathetic writer about an artist who, for many years, was at the despised frontier of modernism in Britain. And she seemed unacquainted with either precision or sub- tlety, both hallmarks of Nicholson's thought and style.
Once I had begun to read, this prejudi- cial distaste was confirmed. While I do not think it is a bad book, it has to be said that author and subject seem spectacularly ill- matched. The first flashing signals indicat- ing Checkland's unsuitability occur in her account of Ben's father, Sir William Nicholson. She misses the inescapable point that, petit maitre though he may be, he is one of the great still-life painters; categorising him as a society portraitist (a small piece in the jigsaw of his achieve- ment) is wholly misplaced. Innocent sur- prise, technical virtuosity and a tonal command that can be miraculous mark his still lifes and landscapes, put down on can- vas as though in one breath. Checkland details the long antagonism — personal and aesthetic — between father and son but fails to analyse their unmistakable kin- ship as artists. Writing of Ben's Edwardian childhood in his parents' world — one of slippers and spats, of upper Bohemia and rented country houses, of Max Beerbohm and Marie Tempest — Checkland continu- ally gives herself away in unevocative prose and smudged art history. It then begins to dawn on the reader that she understands nothing about creative effort and all the personal disadvantages it can bring in the attempt to produce something lasting. This leaves a huge central blank in her book for which no amount of absorbing biographical detail can make amends. Her large cast of characters become the puppets of her prurience. And she seems to dislike nearly all of them. Only Ben's mother, Mabel (née Pryde), and his first wife, Winifred, are exempt among the important roles. Later on, figures of the stature of Naum Gabo and Herbert Read are blatantly cari- catured. As to her attitude to her protago- nist, it's difficult to discern. By the end of her book her pages are coloured by a poor- old-thing tolerance for a man she has painted as an alarming compound of genius, clown and shit.
Inhibited by his father's sophisticated achievements, Ben was a late starter, always a reassuring trait. He adored his mother and was overwhelmed by her pre- mature death, losing confidence and direc- tion. This deepened when, soon afterwards, Sir William married Edith Young-Wortley, a war widow who was, Ben thought, his girlfriend. Briefly at the Slade School of Art before the first world war, Ben had left almost without trace (though he came to know Paul Nash and David Bamberg) and he managed to miss the two great Post- Impressionist shows in London in 1910 and 1912 which contained works by most of the artists who were to provide him with nour- ishment a decade later. Confidence and experiment returned when in 1920 he married the somewhat ungainly, spirited, well-to-do painter Winifred Roberts, granddaughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle. They were able to live in Italy with, as Winifred said, 'a luxurious contempt for money'. Checkland is good on the couple's friendship with the painter Christopher Wood and on his and Ben's chance discov- ery of the Cornish 'primitive' Alfred Wallis. But again, she fails to account for Wallis's impact on Nicholson, both as an influence and as someone whose work confirmed his direction towards sophisticated naivety.
In the early 1930s Barbara Hepworth, already tiring of her marriage to the sculp- tor John Skeaping, set her cap at Ben with a determination that marked her whole career. Ben succumbed and immediately began to juggle his life between Winifred and their three children and Barbara and their eventual triplets. There is no doubt about the intense and fruitful relationship that resulted over the following 20 years; long after their marriage and divorce, Bar- bara loved Ben until her death in 1975.
In their heyday, Nicholson emerged as the most substantial, innovatory and intel- lectually alert painter in Britain, and Hep- worth as a sculptor of European stature. Their contacts with artists such as Braque, Mondrian, Brancusi, Gabo and others helped internationalise the British art world. It is here that Checkland is at her best: she may not love the art — and feels it is her mission to give personal readings of Nicholson's austere geometrical reliefs and paintings — but she establishes its social context and impact with some impressive research.
Soon after, however, she begins her onslaught on Nicholson and Hepworth as manipulative and imperious figures, espe- cially when they became part of the St Ives community of artists at the outbreak of the second world war. In spite of the beauty and inspiration of the place, the mild Cor- nish climate acted as an incubator of rival- ries, jealousy and rancour so that, as Sven Berlin was to write, one could not live there for more than a week 'without being gutted like a herring and spread out in the sun'. Friendships, marriage and children all suffered. But Ben became celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, holding presti- gious shows, winning prizes and becoming rich. He divorced Barbara and married Felicitas Vogler, a German reporter and photographer, and went to live with her in Switzerland. (He refused to be made a Companion of Honour because, he quipped, CH was already on the back of his car.) Since his marriage to Winifred, Ben had been a Christian Scientist, had intro- duced Barbara to his beliefs and gradually evolved a whole cranky system of 'good thoughts', 'possessiveness' and 'power'. God interrupted all their lives like a family retainer in a farce turning to tragedy. Ben's third wife introduced predestination, horo- scopes and astrology, so much so that even Ben complained that she was 'deeply involved in the next existence, whereas I want to get on with this one'. He returned to England in 1971 and spent his last years in Hampstead in deteriorating health and pursued by poltergeists, flashes of his old impish humour (Patrick Heron's 'Braque was worse than his bite') breaking through his irascible temper as he chopped and changed his will.
Shoals of red herrings and contextual padding have made this book too long, yet there are omissions bearing on Nicholson's career that make it incomplete. Respect for Checkland's tenacity is finally overwhelmed by her lack of warmth either for her lovable and cantankerous subject or the shining clarity of his art.
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