- 127
Ivon Hitchens
描述
- Ivon Hitchens
- English Parkland
- signed and dated 67; further signed, titled, dated 1966 and inscribed with the Artist's address on a label attached to the stretcher bar
- oil on canvas
- 46.5 by 142cm.; 18¼ by 56in.
來源
Cork Street Gallery, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 13th May 1992, lot 82
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner, 30th June 1992
展覽
Norfolk, Narborough Hall, Ivon Hitchens, Paintings, 27th May - 27th August 2007, un-numbered exhibition.
Condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
拍品資料及來源
Two years previously, Hitchens had bought a summer-house on the beach at Selsey, with an uninterrupted view over the shingle across the wide sweep of the bay. As Peter Khoroche has noted ‘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 [the artist’s house and studio] Greenleaves’ (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Andre Deutsche, 1990, p.105) and buying the house at Selsey seems to coincide with a shift in Hitchens' colour - at first a move to soft, pastel oranges and yellows, but quickly turning to bright primaries. Hitchens, for all his diffidence and deliberate isolation from the London art world, was well aware of the high regard in which he was held by a younger generation of painters, the likes of Roger Hilton, Howard Hodgkin and especially Patrick Heron, whose 1955 monograph on Hitchens considers his work in almost purely abstract, Greenberg-ian terms. And in these paintings from the 1960s, Hitchens seems to be repaying the compliment, using a palette more akin to American painting, both Hard-Edge and Abstract Expressionist.
Hitchens retained this intensity as his eye moved from the shore at Selsey back, once again, to his beloved woodlands around Greenleaves. The patterns of the seasons moving through the trees once again required the greens, purples and brown so prevalent in his work from the 1950s, but now his blues feel more electric and the deep, warm tones find contrast with bright reds and yellow.
English Parkland is also a perfect demonstration of Hitchens’ trademark balance of figuration and abstraction, 'in which surface pattern and spatial recession sing together and each part of the canvas is in relationship to every other part – in which pigment and brush-stroke can be appreciated for their own sake, yet mysteriously and simultaneously suggest something seen and felt' (Khoroche, ibid. p.106). The painting divides into three parts – a curving progression in from the left, opening out to a wide, clear space in the middle, followed by a dense explosion of colour and brushwork to the right. This is painting as a ‘visual music’ (to use Hitchens’ own phrase), the work divided into three movements. Music can inspire a sense of landscape – of space and movement and of the elements – and yet is fundamentally abstract, a language in itself. In paintings such as English Parkland, Hitchens achieves, in painting what should perhaps be music's sole preserve.