An expedition for the eyes
Goes to see a vivid life’s work in at the Pallant House Gallery
A1931 holiday snap depicts the emerging giants of British modernism – Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore – poised for a brisk dip off the Norfolk coast. To one side, looking on, Ivon Hitchens appears to be dressed more for a meeting with his bank manager. The image could be a metaphor of Hitchens’s place in 20th-century art, because despite his closeness to the movers and shakers of abstraction, he seems to occupy an altogether different world.
In fact, the formal clothing, and Hitchens’s reportedly sombre temperament, belied his elemental sensibilities. Working for almost 40 years from a travellers’ caravan near Petworth, he rarely ventured far from the six acres of woodland he had purchased. “Hitchens in West Sussex provides the most distinguished example of… profound personal identification, of a painter with a special place or landscape,” observed his friend, the painter Patrick Heron.
Spend some time with his works and you begin to smell the dewy glades or hear the squelch of mudcaked wellies. Despite being keenly aware of international developments in painting, Hitchens stayed rooted to the South Downs, his art becoming more abstract along the way. “Each painting should be a voyage of discovery – an expedition for the eye,” he said. And what a sensory expedition this show, marking the 40th anniversary of Hitchens’s death, turns out to be.
Pallant House Gallery has a particular historical relationship with Hitchens; the first two works it acquired came from him. Painted 50 years apart, Curved Barn (1922) and November Revelation (1973) bookend an exhibition that, more or less, chronologically traces his life’s work. In Curved Barn, futurism meets sensuous, oriental curves in what could be a backdrop for the Ballets Russes. While November Revelation
is a riotous abstract of gaudy clouds, drifting and bursting across an azure sky. What connects the two, and all in between, is Hitchens’s visceral engagement with the natural world.
Born in 1893, Hitchens chimed early with the European avant-garde, especially Cézanne, and at 26, he was a co-founder of the Seven and Five Society.
Prettier than cubism but less vibrant than Matisse, while referencing both, Hitchens introduced Kandinskyesque rhythm to domestic interiors. Similarities abound with the Bloomsbury painters, not surprisingly as Hitchens revered Clive Bell’s seminal treatise Art. But Hitchens’s brushwork and palette would have been a little intense even for the Charleston crew.
Ben and Winifred Nicholson welcomed Hitchens to their Cumbrian farmhouse. Arrangements of flowers in front of open windows invited pictorial questions about notions of inner and outer, the foreground subject often meshing with the landscape beyond. The Nicholsons’ influence was strong, but the cry of nature soon outweighed the domesticity of flowerpots. The most unexpected image here, Grey Willows by the Coast could have come from the head of Edvard Munch.
In the late Thirties, Hitchens began working on long, horizontal canvases, conveying an emotional response to nature – through swathes of vegetable greens and mulchy browns – without ever precisely defining it. At the heart of his work is a kind of “vitalism”
– the idea of an energetic vibration underpinning the natural world that is distinct from the purely physical. “The canvas receives life, becomes alive, gives back life, and finally shows the relativity of nature,” Hitchens wrote.
What is admirable, in this retrospective of almost 80 works, is Hitchens’s resistance to becoming formulaic. As the suggestions of organic forms recede, brighter, vivid slashes and stabs of mauves and fuchsia pink, oranges and purples, dance across the canvas. Hitchens’s later paintings are total abstractions.
Returning time and again to the same places, Ivon Hitchens teased out en plein air the countless possible ways of responding to one subject. Nature was merely the starting point for paintings that are essentially concerned with the limitless possibilities of marks and colours in defining space, apparently spontaneous but consciously constructed and dexterously executed.
This, in itself, sets Hitchens apart from the cooler geometric exercises of his more internationally celebrated contemporaries. To dive into his singular vision is well worth the expedition.