SP 4922
IVON HITCHENS
London 1893 –1979 Petworth
Figure on the blue cushion
Signed; signed, dated 1968 and inscribed with the title on a label attached to the reverse
Canvas: 20 x 24 in / 50.8 x 61 cm
Framed Size 29 ¾ x 33 ¾ in / 75.6 x 85.7 cm
In its original frame
Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, London
Dr and Mrs N Hawkins, Sydney
Though best known for his elongated, broadly painted landscapes, Hitchens also painted interiors, still lifes and figure paintings. In November 1950 the artist exhibited twenty-seven paintings, all nudes, at the Leicester Galleries in London. Wyndham Lewis, who reviewed the exhibition for The Listener wrote: ‘When an artist has evolved a manner so intensely personal that a picture of his can be recognized a half-a-mile away, and has for a number of years remained pretty stationary, it is most unusual for him to break the spell and open up on us with a new line. Yet this is what has happened at the Leicester Galleries where Ivon Hitchins [sic] has broken out of his brown web and revealed to our astonished gaze a large recumbent nude female. What is one to say, except congratulate him on this comely girl, and wait to see what is going to happen next?’ (cited in Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, André Deutsch Limited, London, 1990, p 71).
Having left London for West Sussex in 1940 (following extensive damage to his Hampstead studio during an air-raid), the rarity of nudes in Hitchen’s work could simply be explained by the scarcity of professional models. As Rosenthal elucidates ‘The artist himself is wry and amusing about the paucity of nudes in his work. He always explains how difficult it is to get models down from London; how infinitely more difficult to keep them amused and awake while he paints them; and how impossible it is to explain to them why he has to desert them in a probably under-heated studio, because he has just seen a new conjunction of hitherto familiar landscape through a window and must abandon the girl, at least temporarily, in order to record it before the memory fades’ (T.G. Rosenthal in Ivon Hitchens, edited by Alan Bowness, Lund Humphries, London, 1973, p. 14).
Painted eighteen years after the Leicester Galleries exhibition, Figure on the blue cushion displays an incredibly vibrant palette in the rainbow-hued patchwork which envelops the reclining nude. The undulating curves of the boldly simplified central figure are clearly defined and areas of the flesh, such as the thigh, subtly modelled. The curvaceous body, like many of Hitchen’s nudes, appears endless as her sweeping contours traverse the length of the canvas and are not bound by it, her legs cropped above the ankle. Hitchens referred to this ‘sense of infinity’ in his Notes on Painting, as being a major component of any picture (P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, Hampshire, 2007, p.103).
While clearly celebrating the innate sensuality of the female form in its voluptuous fluidity, Hitchens saw and interpreted the subject in terms of landscape. Virtually all are reclining nudes and are therefore the same size and horizontal format as the artist’s landscape compositions. Often the female figure formed the basis, or as Peter Khoroche suggests, ‘formal framework for an exercise in colour composition’, the point of interest being less the relationship between the parts of the body than between the colours upon the canvas (ibid, pp.100-101). In Figure on the blue cushion, the rhythm and vitality of the mosaic-like work, as well as the suggested spontaneity of the paint’s application, belies the meticulous design and disciplined balance of colour forms.
In the present work, Hitchens contrasted the vibrant, progressively high-keyed colours, including rich red, orange, purple, blues and sharp notes of yellow (introduced in the 1950s) with the muted brown, black and green woodland colours of the 1940s. He also varied their application and texture, creating structured areas of parallel strokes interspersed with more fluid passages of rough daubing. The space and forms created by the colour areas were further enhanced by margins of white canvas. Hitchens clarified: ‘the reason for the white areas or lines of white ‘canvas’…showing in my pictures is to provide channels isolating the areas of paint so that they can be felt relatively to each other, in their shape, area, weight and meaning’ (cited in Ivon Hitchens: A Retrospective Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1979, p. 16). Definitively the artist wrote to Herbert Read in 1951, ‘The essence of my theory is that colour is space and space is colour’ (ibid., p. 16).
IVON HITCHENS
London 1893 –1979 Petworth
Born on the 3rd of March 1893, Ivon Hitchens was the son of landscape artist Alfred Hitchens, and studied at St John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London during the First World War. In 1922 he became the founding member of the Seven and Five Society, and the same year had his first one-man show exhibition at The Mayer Gallery in London. In the 1920’s and 30’s he lived in a studio in Hampstead, within a circle of avant-garde artists known as The London Group, which included Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson. Hitchens and his wife Mollie left London for Sussex in 1940 after a bomb landed next door to his studio.
For the next forty years, Hitchen’s six acres of woodland near Midhurst became his home, place of study and constant source of inspiration. In 1955 Patrick Heron wrote Hitchen’s first monograph and the following year The British Council arranged a retrospective exhibition of his work for the Venice Biennale. Ivon Hitchens died in August 1979.