1. Isabel Nicholas, known at various times as Isabel Delmer, Isabel Lambert, and Isabel Rawsthorne was a British painter, scenery and costume designer, and occasional artists' model.
23 Facts About Isabel Nicholas
1. 2.
Isabel Nicholas was part of an artistic bohemian society that included Jacob Epstein, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.
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Isabel Nicholas was born in the East End of London, the daughter of a master mariner.
4.
Isabel Nicholas studied at the Liverpool College of Art, won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London and spent two years in the studio of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
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Isabel Nicholas then moved to Paris, where she continued her studies of the nude at the liberal Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
6.
Isabel Nicholas associated with Giacometti, Tristan Tzara and the Surrealist circle, but was committed to a figurative form of modern art which she called 'Quintessentialism'.
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Isabel Nicholas maintained connections to an alternative circle of representational artists including Francis Gruber and Peter Rose Pulham, as well as Balthus and Derain.
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Isabel Nicholas's outlook was anti-idealist, intellectual and, like Giacometti, she saw painting from the real world as a challenge that could never be fully met.
9.
Isabel Nicholas's father supplied exotic creatures to British zoos, and, as a child, she took to drawing these and other wildlife.
10.
Isabel Nicholas's characteristically astonished gaze and defiant stance can be seen in the new kind of etiolated figure that Giacometti developed over the next decade.
11.
Isabel Nicholas did not share the fashionable interest in the formal properties of Oceanic or Archaic art.
12.
Isabel Nicholas studied this quality in Early Renaissance paintings, and in the evidence of the body itself, X-rays, skeletons, figures and animals she found in the countryside or drew in London Zoo.
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Isabel Nicholas began a career as a designer for the Royal Ballet and the opera at Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells.
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Isabel Nicholas continued her studies of the body, in motion this time, in the practice rooms of the Royal Ballet.
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Isabel Nicholas worked with Andre Derain, and lived and travelled for a time with Balthus and his wife.
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Isabel Nicholas was painted several times by Derain and Pablo Picasso.
17.
Isabel Nicholas relinquished at least one ticket out and did not flee until the day the Germans arrived on 14 June 1940.
18.
Isabel Nicholas remained with Delmer for the first part of the war, but they later divorced in 1947.
19.
Isabel Nicholas maintained indirect links with France by working in intelligence and black propaganda for the Political Warfare Executive.
20.
Isabel Nicholas continued to be involved in the evolution of the figurative style associated with Existentialism.
21.
Isabel Nicholas socialised with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl and other intellectuals, and for a time lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the journal Les Temps Modernes.
22.
Isabel Nicholas continued to see Giacometti, but eventually married Alan Rawsthorne in 1951.
23.
Isabel Nicholas raised geese, a nod to her interest in Konrad Lorenz, and became involved in the emergent environmentalist movement.