Roger Hilton |
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Thinking Through Paint biography Today Roger Hilton is recognised as one of the most important English painters of the later twentieth century. Closely associated with the artists who made St Ives a renowned centre for contemporary art in the 1950s and 60s, he also spent much of his time in London working with many English and international colleagues. His most enduring subject was an exuberantly eroticised female body, whose sometimes fantastic anatomy was the vehicle for the whole range of human feeling, from joyous sensuality to fury. He was always acutely sensitive to his medium, whether it was oil paint, charcoal or gouache, sustaining constant experimentation within the discipline of fine painting. Less that a year before he died, he summarised the attitude that made him a great painter: Art if it is anything, is a blood and death battle, into which you have to throw everything you 've got. Born in 1911, Hilton spent much of the 1930s studying in Paris, where, like others of his generation, he developed a life-long allegiance to French painting. Acutely intelligent, well-read, a witty, energetic man, he gravitated after the war to artists determined to push back the barriers of what painting might do, to create a new artistic language for a society that was reconstructing itself. An invitation in 1951 to take part in Abstract Paintings, Sculptures and Mobiles, the first fully abstract post-war exhibition in England, at the A.I.A. gallery in London, identified him with the most innovative artists in a still intensely conservative visual culture. A year later he held his first post-war solo exhibition, at Gimpel Fils. A young gallery with a policy of promoting contemporary art, it was already recognised for an ability to pick out potentially distinguished artists. Hilton's work was well-received, a remarkable achievement given the still widespread hostility to abstract art. He was described as a natural painter, expressive, displaying variety and inventiveness. |
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| His inventiveness was boosted and challenged when; in 1953 he became friendly with the Dutch artist, Constant. They debated how abstract painting might become a purely spatial phenomenon, integrated into architecture. As a result of their encounter Hilton was stimulated to think more intensively than ever before, through the medium of paint, with the result that though he never abandoned easel-painting to collaborate with architects, as did Constant, he embarked on his first unequivocally abstract paintings. Hilton was now associated with the group of constructivists, principally concerned with three-dimensional art, who were led by Victor Pismire. Lawrence Dalloway s famous book, Nine Abstract Artists 1954 ascribed avant-garde status to all of them. Some of Hilton s confident, vibrant canvases of this period made no reference to the visible world, while other, now renowned paintings bore strong traces of the human body. Nothing quite like his work had been seen before; it marked out a fresh territory. Hilton s statement in Alloway's book was existential in tone, vividly conveying the trauma of creativity: 'The abstract artist submits himself entirely to the unknown himself entirely to the unknown ... he is like a man swinging out into the void'. Yet his determination to venture further into the void prompted him to
write to Terry Frost towards the end of 1954: 'I am going in future to
introduce if possible a more markedly human element in my pictures ...
'I m not going to be "afraid" of figuration any more'. It was a bold step
at a time when artists were rigidly categorised, though clearly one of
Hilton's great strengths was his ability to disregard the abstract / figurative
divide and instead to suggest a human, animal or - though 'he loathed
"views" '- even a landscape presence within the richness of the paint.
Critics often remarked on his luscious surfaces that evoke rather than
define, in which the accidents of paint were embraced, in a very French
manner, as the spur to the creation of an image. 'The greatest artist',
he wrote, 'will be the one who most completely lets the medium shoulder
the idea'. Throughout the 1950s Hilton continued to show with Gimpel Fils and was invited to take part in many group exhibitions, such as The Mirror and the Square and 'Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract', that were organised by leading critics to define the cutting edge of current practice. Here his work hung beside that of prominent abstract artists of an earlier generation like Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and his peers, who included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Lanyon and Alan Davie. A solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1958 was mark of respect granted to few of his contemporaries. By the end of the decade he was a familiar figure in the art world, selling his work readily; a prize-winner in the 1961 John Moores exhibition and the 1964 Venice Biennale, he was widely exhibited abroad by the British Council and was a participant in the prestigious Dokumenta II. Throughout this decade he spent increasingly long periods in Cornwall, moving permanently to Botallack, on the Penwith peninsula, with his second wife, Rose Phipps, in 1965. Here he had many friend and, though Hilton was apt to be quarrelsome, the fights that occasionally erupted were heavily ritualised and normal relations were quickly restored. In this exhibition, which is particularly rich in the work of the Botallack years, a constant play can be seen between Hilton's paintings and life drawings: a drawing made in a moment of intimate hilarity is transformed in paint into potent drama when a fragment of the body is isolated - or made 'abstract'. He seems habitually to have drawn bodies in motion, so that movements overlap and run into one another in anatomically impossible ways that convey an intensely human sensation. A tireless gallery visitor in earlier years, Hilton remained acutely
aware of current developments in art. If his economic, eloquent line principally
recalls Matisse, the tension so often visible between line and paint,
that contributes so much to the uncompromising quality of his surfaces,
is shared with Sandra Blow and the Italian painter Alberto Burri. Tough,
witty images of women, with flying hair, rectangular torsos and stick
limbs are distantly related to the paintings of William Scott who, like
others who taught at Corsham, transmitted the imagery of Jean Dubuffet
to a wider circle of English artists. The gouaches that Hilton made between 1972 and his death - colourful, deceptively child-like representations of nudes, animals, horses and carts, boats and flowers - are defiantly exuberant confrontations with illness and approaching death. They resemble in this the poignant, witty, 'Night Letters' that he wrote to his wife during long sleepless nights, setting out his needs - for visitors, fixative, Marmite - and also his love, frustration and self-awareness. Though virtually bed-ridden by the end of 1972, he attended the opening of his Arts Council retrospective in March 1974 and even flew to Antibes for a family holiday the following summer - with no luggage but a bathing costume and whisky in a plastic bag. He died on 23 February 1975. 'A wild, destructive, gawky imagery is subjected to the discipline of fine painting', wrote Patrick Heron, defining the paradox for which Hilton s paintings are so greatly admired today. A fearless, unconventional artist with little interest in American painting at a time when it overwhelmed many of his colleagues, he remained committed to a European tradition of figure painting. His achievement was to convert it into an uncompromisingly modern, passionate declaration of the centrality of human relationships. He painted love, joy, laughter and anger as though they were tangible: he made emotion visible. Margaret Garlake |
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| There is an urgency to the best work of Roger Hilton. Vivid, intense, obsessive, his nervy discontinuous line has a beguiling authority. It is intelligent and particular. Fizzing with passion, it has an immediacy which acts directly on the nervous system. It is a febrile, teasing line - teasing to the eye, but also to the mind. You cannot ignore this artist. Hilton re-locates us: he makes us crucially aware of how we stand in relation to his art. More often than not, we find ourselves having to reassess preconceptions, quietly laughing. Sometimes Hilton laughs with us - that is, when he's not too busy laughing at the impossibility of making his point. Yet he makes his point so well, so acutely, in images fresh with ideas, perceptions, and visual inventions, it is surely our fault if we don't grasp it.
The variety of mark matches the emotional range that Hilton encompasses. It was the timing and mood of that 'moment of contact' between brush and canvas, or charcoal and paper, which was absolutely crucial to the success of an image. Hence the variable quality of his output. Constantly we see him engaging with the edges of the canvas or paper, the pictures turning outwards rather than inwards, going forward, going beyond. (Nothing could be more assertive of the inner life of his shapes.) The game deepens with every figure/ground relationship.
1911 Born 23rd March, Northwood, Middlesex AWARDS
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS |
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