The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art owns a fine collection of paintings and prints by Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), one of the leading British artists of the twentieth century. That collection has now improved and expanded dramatically, thanks to an extraordinary bequest made by Felicitas Vogler, Nicholson's third wife.
Ben Nicholson's father was the artist William Nicholson, and his mother was the Scottish painter Mabel Pryde. He studied briefly at the Slade School in London. From the early 1930s his work became increasingly abstract, geometrical and austere.
Nicholson married three times: firstly to the artist Winifred Nicholson, and then to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. In 1957 Nicholson and Vogler met in St Ives, Cornwall, and married just two months later. They moved to Switzerland in 1958. Although Nicholson returned to England in 1971, the couple remained on friendly terms.
Vogler was a celebrated photographer, holding a major exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in 2006. Following her death later that year, she left the Gallery a superb collection of Nicholson's work, including ten paintings and carved reliefs and twenty prints and drawings. These works now join the works already belonging to the Gallery to form an outstanding collection of Nicholson's art, ranging from the early 1920s to the 1980s.
The whole collection is on show in this new display, occupying the top floor of the Dean Gallery.
