Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was a member of the iconic St Ives
School in Cornwall, where he and his contemporaries established themselves as
pivotal in the development of modern and abstract in the early twentieth
century. The arrival in 1939 of some of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary
artists transformed this British coastal town into an artists’ colony, which
included Nicholson whose influence helped establish St Ives as the nucleus of
the modern art movement attracting both local and visiting students. The works
of Alfred Wallis were discovered by Nicholson some eleven years previously,
with Wallis subsequently becoming one of Britain’s best known naïve artists. Those in the St Ives School were stylistically diverse, but
each of them drew inspiration from the landscape within which they lived and is
evidenced in the contrasting abstract works of Peter Lanyon, for instance, and
Sandra Blow. The legacies left by this group of bohemian artists on the modern
art movement in this small Cornish coastal town was reinforced in 1993 with the
opening of Tate St Ives.

St Ives, Cornwall, is an internationally-recognised centre
in the history and development of modern and abstract art in Britain, and
continues to this day to be a vibrant and thriving community for the arts and
culture. Commonly viewed as a destination for the avant-garde and experimental
St Ives first gained recognition following the foundation of the Leach Pottery
in 1920, which is widely associated with shaping the emergence of studio
pottery in the United Kingdom. The success of the St Ives School was formed by
two distinct but interwoven narratives centred on the utopian ideals of
constructivism and a tradition of craft and the handmade, which united works of
ceramics, abstraction, and carving.