ROGER HILTON | 1967

Private Collection, London
Their sale, Christie's London, 23rd October 1996, lot 87, where acquired by the present owner

The canvas is original. There is some very minor undulation towards the corners and a very faint stretcher bar mark visible towards the lower edge. There is one tiny spot of loss towards the upper part of the left edge and one tiny loss to the impasto towards the tip of the yellow pigment. There are two thin and short fine lines of craquelure in the upper right quadrant, and one towards the lower left corner. There are a small number of very faint handling marks and extremely light scuffs towards the edges in places, most evident in the white pigment. There are two further very faint rubs to the lower right red form and a small area of discolouration in the white pigment to the left of the red form. There are speckles of detritus and studio matter and dirt in places. Subject to the above, the work appears in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. The work is floated in a wooden slip frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Until very recently, major oils by Roger Hilton have appeared all too rarely on the auction market. As a result, his was a discrete market, of private collectors, the majority of whom rarely own just the one Hilton. In the last eighteen months, however, four mature oils have appeared at auction, unsurprisingly setting record prices. The appearance of 1967, last seen over 20 years ago, is therefore yet another marker in this transformation of Hilton’s market, as finally a wider audience is able to experience the best of this singular artist, whose work should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of avant-garde abstract painting of the 1950s and '60s, from Europe or America.

Hilton’s paintings were always rare, even before they became locked-down amongst the Hilton cognoscenti, as he was never the most prolific of artists. His working day always began at home, where he would draw, working his ideas down into their most economical expression. These drawings are often figurative, albeit with the figure boiled down to the point of abstraction and it was these abstracted traces that Hilton would then take with him to the studio in the afternoon. It is what gives his painting its unique quality: his forms have a presence to them, an emotional weight. This can be seen very clearly in 1967, which can read as an artfully balanced arrangement of shapes, in an exquisite harmony of black, ochres, umbers and a dark burnt red. Yet this would be to see only a fraction of the work, as it pulses with a physical – corporeal – presence. One can’t help but feel (and this word is used here deliberately) the crook of an elbow, the bend of a knee, the curve of a belly or the outline of a breast. This sense grounds Hilton’s work in our world, in the viewer’s body. It makes it existential in a way that figurative art is meant to be. 

By the time he painted 1967, Hilton had moved permanently to St Ives, where the division between home and studio became less and less distinct and paintings were made at an even slower rate. The work also takes on a more graphic quality: the skein of charcoal under-drawing that Hilton previously left deliberately visible starts to disappear, as he maps his works directly with the brush. Forms take on a harder edge. Hilton’s later paintings in many ways resemble the later figurative works of Philip Guston. Whilst superficially miles apart, they have the same casual power, a brilliance masked by a deliberately rough technique, and a dark humour woven into every gesture. It’s a strange quirk of both Hilton and Guston’s careers that as they progressed, their painting became less sophisticated, more raw. Yet Hilton had always sensed this. As he wrote back in 1961, in an introduction to his show at Galerie Charles Lienhard in Zurich, ‘at heart everyone knows that beneath the everyday appearance of things are hidden truths which intuition alone can grasp. Today, when everything is put in question, man is trying again to orientate himself...there is no excuse for fooling around. I see art as an instrument of truth or nothing’ (quoted in Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton, Thames & Hudson 2004, p.160).