Ben Nicholson at Pallant House review: Artist’s story illuminates the struggle of British culture to revitalise itself

The show effectively draws you into Nicholson’s world, highlighting the influence of still life on even his most apparently abstract work, with many of the original objects displayed beside the paintings they inspired, writes Mark Hudson

‘June 16-47’ by Ben Nicholson (Courtesy of Pallant House)

These days, the Father of British Modern Art is best known as Mr Barbara Hepworth. For decades, Ben Nicholson appeared to be almost the only credible British modernist, who kept the flag flying for abstract art in the dark days of the Thirties. He squared up to international giants of the order of Mondrian and Walter Gropius as part of the interwar Hampstead scene, and later as kingpin of St Ives modernism. Meanwhile his wife, collaborator and later rival, Hepworth, appeared too tied to the human figure and to landscape to be fully “modern”, and was, as a woman, an inevitably anomalous figure.

Over the decades since, of course, Hepworth’s status has kept on rising – it seems only a matter of time before she’s hailed as the greatest British artist of the 20th century – while Nicholson now appears just one of many slightly neglected “modern British” artists.

Indeed, where Hepworth is currently riding high with an acclaimed new biography and accompanying exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield, Nicholson is making do with a show focusing on his still lifes. And while there’s no disgrace in a show at Chichester’s excellent Pallant House, the exhibition does – probably unintentionally – underline the current gap in status between the artists by having a whacking great wooden sculpture by Hepworth towering over the entrance.