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Books and Exhibitions

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Ben and Winifred Nicholson: Art and Life

This book examines the artistic partnership of Ben Nicholson and Winifred Nicholson in the 1920s and their friendship and collaboration with Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, and the potter William Staite Murray.


Inspired by each other, the Nicholsons experimented furiously and often painted the same subject, one as a colorist the other more interested in form. Winifred wrote of her time with Ben, 'All artists are unique and can only unite as complementaries not as similarities'.

New research based on previously unpublished letters, photographs and other material draws out their fascinating connections.

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This book explores the career of the St Ives artist Kate Nicholson, daughter of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, from her early landscapes, the still lifes painted in Cumberland and St Ives, the abstracts - many of them inspired by her travels in Greece - to the late works made on the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides.

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​Published to accompany the exhibition 'Kate Nicholson' at Falmouth Art Gallery, this book is the first monograph on this highly talented artist who deserves to be better known. It illustrates many works from both public and private collections and draws on groundbreaking new research, together with the author's experience of travelling with her on painting trips.

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Winifred Nicholson: Liberation of Colour

This publication explores the whole career of Winifred Nicholson with a special emphasis on her theories of colour. Using specific paintings to examine her ideas and writings about colour the book includes her late 'prismatic' pictures which have never been properly explained.


Throughout her life Winifred Nicholson was interested in prisms and rainbows, but when she was given some prisms by a physicist friend in the mid 1970s her painting took on a new direction. Looking through a prism she saw objects with a rim of prismatic colour, and explored and developed these ideas, often painting pictures that verged on the abstract. Nicholson's 'prismatic' pictures were a culmination of her life's search to find "form's secret and rhythmic law".


Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Liberation of Colour' at mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern art, the book illustrates many previously unseen paintings from private collections, as well as some of Nicholson's best known works, and draws on new research, including previously unseen archival material.

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Winifred Nicholson in Cumberland

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, which examines Winifred Nicholson's creativity in Cumberland over a period of sixty years.

Books / Exhibitions: Work

©2021 by Jovan Nicholson

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