LONDON.- Once or twice in every generation, there is an artist who stands out as being utterly fused with their own landscape, their work deeply rooted in the place they inhabit. Ivon Hitchens is one such artist.
Jonathan Clark Fine Art represents the artist’s estate and holds the largest inventory of Hitchens’ work. Between 5th and 27th May 2016, the gallery will show approximately 28 paintings – dating from the late 1920s through to the early 1970s - in the exhibition, Under the Greenwood.
In 1920, Ivon Hitchens became a founding member of the Seven and Five Society – a group that would later include Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore – reflecting the more avant-garde tendencies of the time. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hitchens lived in Hampstead amongst what critic Herbert Read called a ‘gentle nest of artists’ that included not only Ben Nicholson, Hepworth and Moore, but also the leading European modernists, Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo.
In 1940, when Hitchens’ studio suffered bomb damage, he moved to Petworth, West Sussex, where he set up home in a gypsy caravan. From this time, he remained distanced from the predominant literary trends of modern British art; closer instead to the modern French masters, especially the Fauvists, in his commitment to colour and open brushwork, and his interest in portraying the sensations, rather than the exactitudes, of nature.
Like Paul Cézanne – and indeed Claude Monet – Hitchens mostly painted outside; just as Monet had Giverny, Hitchens had Greenleaves: his own six acres of woodland that became his home, his subject and his paradise. Here he dug a series of shallow pools designed to reflect the patterns of trees and sky, and everyday for 40 years he would go forth, from his caravan, easel and canvases in his wheelbarrow, to paint. Of this practice, Hitchens said: “A good painter is he who, like a magician, having taken thought, offers the magic word, and conjures up life from within the canvas” – and like a magician, Hitchens’ stage had to be set.
Isolation, too, became an essential ingredient for creative activity, and although visceral in his response, the act of painting involved a process of measured planning: “I seek first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject, which is synonymous with its structure, and to understand my own psychological reactions to it. Next I must decide how best it can be rendered in paint…”
There is a dual aspect to his paintings: they are neither entirely abstract nor completely figurative. The more exciting of his works hold the two qualities in equilibrium. His exploratory approach is essential when approaching the same subject time and time again; he famously transfers the same approach to the shape of his canvases – the double and triple square format, which suggests panorama and experiments with peripheral vision. ‘I like my long shapes’ he wrote, ‘so that I can “move”, so that one half or part reacts against, whilst furthering the purpose of the other.’ Hitchens aimed to reconcile the vertical eye-movement with sweeping horizontal rhythms. His outputs were planned sequences of rhythmic moves bought to life through strategic dramatic brushstrokes, colour, shape and gradient of line that drags the eye around the canvas; in this regard, Hitchens had a level of discipline that seems almost unique when set against his artistic contemporaries.
Above all else, Hitchens’ art represents his lifelong romance with nature: one of the most consistently dynamic muses of modern British art. He represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale and had major retrospectives at, Tate Gallery London (1963), the Royal Academy of Arts (1979) and the Serpentine Gallery (1989), and his work is represented in many museum collections throughout the world – including Tate Gallery (London), the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Scottish National Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal), Nasjonalgalleriet (Oslo), Göteborgs Konstmuseum (Gothenburg) and Musée national d’Art Moderne (Paris).
