Ivon Hitchens

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner

Original canvas. Unexamined out of frame. The canvas is sound. There are Artist's pinholes along the extreme edges of the canvas. There are lines of craquelure running along the extreme edges of the work, where the canvas folds over the stretcher, and one or two small losses to the impasto elements. There is an area of craquelure the light blue and lilac pigment in the bottom right corner. Traces of surface dirt and matter. Subject to the above the work is in very good overall condition, with strong fresh colours throughout. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of restoration or retouching. The work is held within a simple white and gilt painted wood frame under glass. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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What is perhaps most remarkable about this powerful and exuberant work is that it was painted when Ivon Hitchens was 79 years old. It shows that, for this most quiet and diffident of men, there was no going gentle into the good night: instead, in his final decade, he reverted to a palette certainly in line with the wider zeitgeist, but more specifically in tune with the new generation of British abstract painters for whom he was an inspiration, in particular Patrick Heron.

It was Heron who had written the first proper monograph on Hitchens in 1955, for the Penguin Modern Painters series, a book that reads as Heron himself walking through the steps needed to transition from his own early work, based on a loose interpretation of Braque, through to pure abstraction. Indeed Heron writes about Hitchens as an abstract painter, even though Hitchens himself never let go of the figurative – his classic motifs of woodland, boats on a lake, still lives of flowers. Yet such is the sheer painterliness of Hitchens, his profound commitment to colour as a carrier of emotion and to the brushstroke as the conveyor of narrative, that to see his work in abstract terms is the best way to fully appreciate its complexity and bravura.

Ever since the 1930s Hitchens had held the seemingly opposing forces of abstraction and figuration in perfect balance. An Uprush of Flowers speaks eloquently of this: it is clearly a painting of flowers, still in their white paper wrapping, with bright orange poppies spilling out into the foreground. Yet this image dissolves before our eyes into a miasma of balanced form and elegantly juxtaposed colour (blue to yellow to ochre to black to inky green) and of loose, dynamic brushwork that does little to describe space and volume, but instead describes its own inherent value as marks on a surface. Hitchens always left evidence of the under-drawing (he rarely sketched on paper, preferring to map out his works directly on the canvas with a blue brush) in order to disrupt our illusionistic gaze and draw us back to the painting’s surface: in An Uprush of Flowers the intensity of the upper section gives way to this spare under-drawing, creating a sensuous contrast between different conceptions of art and illusion.

In 1965 Hitchens bought a cottage on the beach at Selsey. The view from his studio room provided a stark contrast to the deliberately enclosed and shaded environment around his sanctuary at Greenleaves, nestled deep in the Sussex woods. As Peter Khoroche writes, ‘The little cottage was nothing special in itself, but it stood right on the beach and, being at the easternmost end of Selsey Bill, gave an unhindered view of the low shoreline that sweeps across the mouth of Pagham Harbour.... Looking out across the shingle, they were confronted only with sky, sea and shore. The simplicity of shape, pared down to essentials - huge sky, open sea, curving shore - could hardly have provided a greater contrast to the luxuriant complexity of Greenleaves. For some time Hitchens had been feeling his way towards a still greater freedom in composition and with it an expansion of his colour range. Here, suddenly, was the stimulus he needed.’ (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, 2007, p.152)

It was in his Selsey landscapes and then the inevitable flower paintings that followed that one can see the beginnings of the high-voltage colour that was to define his work of the following decade, right up to his last paintings. Way back in the 1930s Hitchens had not been averse to the odd vibrant hue, a bright orange poppy amidst the cool greys and celadon greens of his interiors and still-lives. In this great final flourish to the close, however, everything is at high saturation. There is a joy in his use of colour, something that in part can be due to his wider appreciation of what was going on in the art world (he still exhibited regularly with the fashionable Waddington Galleries), but also because, after four decades exploring fundamental principles of ‘opposition, transition, subordination, rhythm, repetition, symmetry and balance’, why not attempt the same, but with everything turned up as far as it can go?