Ivon Hitchens

Leicester Galleries, London
Sale, Christie's London, 12th July 1974, lot 350
Waddington Galleries, London
R.J.B. Walker
Private Collection, U.K., where acquired by the present owner

Venice, XXVIII Biennale, June - October 1956, cat. no.13, with tour to Wiener Sezession, Vienna, Lenbach Gallery, Munich, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Ivon Hitchens, A Retrospective Exhibition, 21st March - 25th April 1979, cat. no.33, with Arts Council tour to Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull and Castle Museum, Nottingham.

Unexamined out of frame. Original canvas. There is very minor, tiny traces of light craquelure in the bottom right edge at the point at which the canvas folds over the stretcher. This is only noticeable upon extremely close inspection. There are a few very minor areas of craquelure including to the orange oval shape in the centre of the composition and the pale orange horizontal strip, lower centre and fine reticulation to the black pigments in the bottom left quadrant. There is a tiny fleck of loss to the raised yellow impasto in the top centre of the composition, but this excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a minor area of fluorescence and possible retouching in the top right corner, with further areas of fluorescence appearing elsewhere which appear in keeping with the nature of the artist's materials. Housed behind glass in a thick white wooden painted frame, float-mounted against a white backing. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In 1955, the year after Autumn Avenue was painted, the first monograph on Ivon Hitchens was published, as part of the Penguin Modern Painters series. At a time when illustrated art books were a luxury, and the reception of and recognition for contemporary art was nothing like it is today, these slender volumes provided a key moment in an artist’s career – and one wonders if this little book’s publication might have held some sway on the selection committee for the following year’s Venice Biennale.

In 1952 the British Pavilion had seen a presentation of the young ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors (see lot 20), whereas the group presentation of 1954 had featured, amongst others, the thirty-two year-old Lucian Freud. In 1956, however, it was the sixty-three-year-old Hitchens who was given the grand main room to himself. Here his unique vision, an art as English as Constable or Turner, was laid out for an international audience: paintings concerned with the shifting patterns of weather and seasons, bright sunlight chased by inky clouds, the shaping of trees in the wind, the reflection of summer foliage in the mirror of a lake. And yet Hitchens’ work is equally an art for the viewer of contemporary art, one who would have seen the latest in Abstract Expressionism at the American Pavilion that year.

Like the New York School painters – and their apologist, Clement Greenberg – Hitchens is concerned as much with the canvas as a purely flat surface, on which certain principles, inherent to painting itself, combine to create a ‘visual sound’ (to use the artist’s own words), entirely unconnected to recreating the appearance of things. (Music, no matter how evocative, is never required to ‘represent’ anything other than itself). As Hitchens had written as early as 1946 (although only publishing these ideas in 1956): ‘Using as instruments in one’s orchestra, each to be heard separately yet all in unity, line, form, plane, shape, tone, notan [a Japanese principle of laying light against dark], colour; warm, cool, recession, progression, softness, sharpness, crowdedness, emptiness, up and down, side to side, curves and straights, and any other pairs of opposites, ordering these in transition, opposition, repetition, symmetry and balance. Taking care to leave a "sense of infinity", yet painting it so that it all looks easy' (from ‘Notes on Painting’, Ark, Royal College of Art, 1956; quoted in full in Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Andre Deutsch, London, 1990, pp.54-56).

It is the combination of allusive figuration and pure painting, held in such exquisite balance that neither dominates the other, which makes Hitchens’ work so powerful and also unique, in both British and European painting. There was certainly nothing at Venice that year quite like it.

What might be more significant about the little Penguin Modern Painters monograph, other than its timing, is the identity of the book’s author – Patrick Heron. At this moment, Heron himself was breaking free from the shackles of a post-Cubist representational style and moving towards a form of abstraction (see lots 3, 6) that has many confluences with the work of the New York School, about which he had written for a number of influential art journals. In his analysis of Hitchens’ work, one can almost sense Heron gathering the courage to make the break to pure abstraction. The mastery with which Hitchens handles colour, tonal variation and dynamic form, with fluid ease and his sheer virtuosity with a brush and the weighting of paint, shows Heron the way, even if Hitchens’ path – in which the motif of the landscape remains – was to become the road less travelled.