Ivon Hitchens

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner

London, Tate Gallery, Ivon Hitchens: a Retrospective Exhibition, 11th July - 18th August 1963, cat. no.18, where lent by the artist, with Arts Council tour to Bradford City Art Gallery, Bradford and Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham.

Alan Bowness (ed.), Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, London, 1973, illustrated pl.156.

Original canvas. The canvas undulates slightly in the top right and left corners. Pin holes are apparent to the extreme edges of the canvas. There is a slight central stretcher bar mark visible in raking light running horizontally. There are areas of extremely minor craquelure visible to the thicker areas of impasto in the top central area of the pale blue pigment (just left of the green) and to the green pigment along the centre of the right edge. There are some instances of very minor frame abrasion with a fleck of resultant loss to the grey pigment along the right edge. This excepting the work appears to be in very good, original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence which appear in keeping with the artist's original technique, and do not suggest retouching. Housed in a thick stained wooden frame (see research note). Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In the classic photograph of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth & Henry Moore on the beach at Happisburgh, Norfolk, taken in 1931,  Ivon Hitchens cuts an avuncular – and distinctly un-moderne -  figure, standing aloof and to the left of this group of bright young things, in his buttoned-up tweed jacket and tie, whilst Moore and Nicholson are stripped  to the waist and  Hepworth poses quite provocatively, both arms behind her head  adjusting her hair, cigarette dangling from  her mouth.

 This image seems to confirm the received wisdom about Hitchens, as an artist who is far from avant-garde: a landscape painter who occasionally lapsed into abstraction, rather than one of our most fluid and intuitive abstract painters, whose work inspired the likes of Patrick Heron and Howard Hodgkin. Yet when this photograph was taken, he was fully up to date with all that was happening on the Continent, long before the European Modern Movement  (in the shape of Moholy-Nagy, Gabo, Gropius and, finally Mondrian) began arriving in London in the mid-30s, especially having known Nicholson from the Seven & Five Society since the 20s, as well as from living and working just around the corner from Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson’s studios in Hampstead. But it was in the midst of this artistic milieu, by around 1933, that Hitchens made what was to become a life-long decision: to create paintings that were fundamentally guided by abstract principles of balance and harmony between form and colour (in which colour itself has its own internal, emotive logic rather than any requirement to perform a straight, representational duty), which, at the same time, retained an overall sense of there being a definite subject – landscape, nude or, as in the case of the present work, still-life.

 

Decorative Fragment, Sky and Sea is, in principle, an abstract painting, the motif  dissolving into an irregular mosaic of loosely brushed forms. The heads of the blooms that tumble across the composition from corner to corner are just simple discs of exquisitely balanced colour, like a Robert Delaunay abstract, only this time bathed with a pale, cold English light rather than the tungsten glare of a Parisian spotlight.  The various elements – flowers, vase, table ­– are linked together by the areas of white, un-painted canvas, that, with a casual sophistication, imply both (illusionistic) space within the composition but re-assert the painting’s essentially flatness, as an arrangement of colours and forms on a single plane.  Indeed, this internal dialogue between (an emotive) space and the painting’s object-ness would have delighted Clement Greenberg, theorist and apologist of American Abstract Expressionism, a full decade later. 

 

Decorative Fragment, Sky and Sea should perhaps be considered the ‘pair’ to the Tate’s Coronation: they are nearly identical in size and one quite likely followed the other onto Hitchens’ easel. Coronation is perhaps the closest British art gets to colour-field painting until Heron’s horizontal ‘stripe’ paintings of the 50s and whilst, on the surface, it is more stripped-down than the present work, it is in many ways very difficult to say which of the two is more abstract.