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Ben Nicholson, son of painter Sir William Nicholson, was born in Denham, England, in 1894 and lived in Hampstead, England, until his death in 1982. He attended the Slad School of Fine Art, London, in 1910-11, and in 1912 he began traveling. After World War I he made frequent trips to Paris, where he was exposed to Cubism, which inspired his first abstract paintings of 1924. He was a guiding member of the 7 & 5 society, a group of abstract artists, from 1924 to its disbanding in 1936. In 1933 he joined the Abstraction-Creation group and made his first abstract relief at the end of that year. The following year he married sculptor Barbara Hepworth. After he visited Piet Mondrian in Paris, his reliefs evolved into strictly geometric compositions of white forms. In 1935-36 he produced Circle, a journal dedicated to Constructivist art, in collaboration with Naum Gabo and J. L. Marting. A move to the Cornish coast in 1939 inspired an outburst of color and an interest in landscape in his art. From 1945 to 1949, he explored still life. In 1950 he began producing his famous large color reliefs. He has his first solo show at the Adelphi Gallery in London in1922, and his first show in America at the Durlacher Gallery in New York. He is now considered one of England's greatest twentieth-century artists. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1975 and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, which subsequently toured the United States. His long-standing interest in naive treatment belied an assured and often playful line. In the still lifes from the 1970s, which incorporated tools, as in his architectural studies, the variety of linear expression ranged from careful description to swift characterization.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Arnold Newman was born on March 3, 1918 in New York City. He attended University of Miami in Florida to study drawing and painting, but left after two years. He then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1946, Arnold Newman opened his own studio in New York City, working with Fortune Life and Newsweek magazines as a freelance photographer. He wanted to capture the essence of the work of artists through his work, and often photographed other artists in their most familiar surroundings. Arnold Newman became a professor at Cooper Union and died on June 6, 2006.

Marte Newcombe was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1948.  The daughter of a Swiss mother and a Yugoslav father, she is an Australian citizen.  Newcombe holds a B.A. and a Diploma of Education from the University of Tasmania, Australia, as well as an M.A. from Australian National University.  She lived in New Guinea and Hong Kong before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1982, where she received a B.F.A. from the Corcoran School of Art in 1985.  Her sculptures and prints have been exhibited in Boston and throughout the mid-Atlantic region.  Newcombe is known for creating figurative microcosms out of rusted tools and bits of broken farm machinery.  These nightmarish allegories address war, power, and the absence of leadership.  Her related works on paper, with aboriginal and pre-Columbia references, are highly expressive and dramatically colored.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.martenewcombe.com/

Robert Nelson was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1925.  He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving his B.A.E. in 1950, and his M.A.E. in 1951.  The highly respected contemporary painter, sculptor, printmaker and collage artist earned many awards such as the

Bryant-Lathrop traveling fellowship in 1951, and the Maccuauley Lithographic Grant, Winnipeg in 1954.  Nelson furthered his education earning his Ph.D. from the New York University in 1971, and went on to join the faculty at various institutions such as Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania, where he earned the rank of professor emeritus.  He currently lives and works in Lakeside, Oregon.  Nelson’s art is included in the permanent collections of many major museums throughout the country such as the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York.

Hans Namuth was born in Essen, Germany, in 1915 and died in East Hampton, New York, in 1990. He was a photojournalist, portrait photographer, and documentary filmmaker. Originally trained as an actor, he fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. He moved to Paris and began taking photographs. His photographs of the Spanish Civil War, taken in collaboration with George Reisner, were his first published photographs; some of them were printed in Life magazine. Namuth moved to New York City in the 1940s and studied photography at the New School for Social Research. Photographs he took while traveling in Guatemala were exhibited in 1949 in Washington, D.C. Namuth is perhaps most renowned for his photographic portraits of postwar American painters, especially Jackson Pollock. His photographs of Pollock, published in Artnews in 1951, were the first to show the artist at work in his studio, dripping and splashing paint onto upstretched canvas. His photographs of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters were published in Artists 1950-1981: A Personal View (1981). In the early 1970s Namuth created a portfolio of early American tools; these were published in a book produced by Olivetti in 1975. He continued to explore tool imagery in photographs that communicate a preciseness of vision as well as a reverence for the objects.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Fred Nagelbach was born in Liebling, Romania in 1943.  He earned a B.A. from Valparaiso University, Indiana, in 1965 and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1967 before continuing his studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich, Germany.  His work has been shown in Chicago and New York.  Combining the lyricism of English sculptor David Nash and the direct carving technique of Constantin Brancusi, Nagelbach creates dreamed architecture and tool sculptures that transport the viewer to a different time and place.  His materials are a mixture of traditional roofing materials and bronze, foam rubber, and polyester resin.  The decorative cupolas of his towers can be read as primitive scale interpretations of ancient and contemporary implements of construction.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.