Fresh and wild
Andrew Lambirth on the abstract painter Roger Hilton and his show at Tate St Ives
Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the finest draughtsmen of the nude in the postwar period and his paintings more often than not make close reference to the human body. He was the most European artist of his generation and was the last major painter not to be influenced by the new wave of Americans whose work was flooding Britain. Hilton is a solitary figure in many ways, whose best painting easily stands comparison with such figures as Guston and de Kooning, and fits into the European context of Dubuffet and Tapies. But he was also a bit of a wild man, given to outrageous behaviour and intemperance, and stories of his rudeness and transgressions have tended to obscure his very real artistic achievement. Although a more powerful and inventive painter than either of his friends and contemporaries Patrick Heron or Terry Frost, he is not as well known to the general public. Now that is set to change.
A substantial exhibition of Hilton’s work has just opened at Tate St Ives (until 21 January 2007). Featuring some 75 paintings and drawings, it gives a succinct and potent overview of Hilton’s career, though it is by no means a full retrospective. There isn’t really room: Tate St Ives is a difficult space in which to show paintings, having round walls, echoing the gasworks it replaced. The works inevitably get split up, and a sense of continuity is sometimes lost, as various single pictures are dotted about in odd places. (I didn’t even see the striking red and black ‘May 1968’ until my second visit, perhaps because it is hung over stairs.) ‘The Aral Sea’, the biggest painting Hilton ever attempted, is hung in splendid isolation on the right of the curved gallery which fronts the sea. This position does not harm it, however, and gives it a deserved prominence above the curve which contains a whole sequence of powerful paintings, including the artist’s most famous image ‘Oi Yoi Yoi’ (1963), with its sequel ‘Dancing Woman’, painted the same year, hanging at the far end.
Among that sequence of five paintings is a strange yellow-legged reclining nude (‘Figure, February 1962’ from the Tate collection), which has a jumpy, edgy quality. ‘Very Gauguin,’ I heard a visitor comment, unexpectedly. Here also is the large and impressive ‘May 1963’ (titling wasn’t Hilton’s strong point), dealing with some of the artist’s favourite colours — red and black and an ochrey orange — but with an underpainting of yellow pulsing through the white in the top left corner. Here, too, can be seen Hilton’s distinctive overdrawing in charcoal, one of his chief characteristics and a significant addition to the surface vitality of his work.
Upstairs a number of pencil drawings have been hung together in two blocks. This nearly works, but ends up rather hugger-mugger, the individual frames being too intrusive. Hilton was a varied and prolific draughtsman, continuously searching, witty and intelligent. His line staggers sometimes, as if carrying too heavy a burden, but it never fails. It reminds me of Chesterton’s great national poem in praise of human nature: ‘The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’.
One of the first things to strike me anew as I wandered through the galleries was Hilton’s daring use of white, very often the off-white of blank canvas. A particularly fine painting is ‘October 1960’, which consists simply of a large, vigorously painted vessel or cup shape balanced on a pair of swiftly drawn charcoal legs. Apart from the sensuous white open-work paint of the cup and the two charcoal lines, the canvas is empty. It’s a risky and difficult thing to bring off, this kind of painterly minimalism, but Hilton does it repeatedly. There’s not a lot of colour in this room, Gallery 3, but splashes of blue and red — in particular in the painting ‘Blue Newlyn’ of 1958 from the Ronnie Duncan Collection add passion to the subtleties of grey, ochre and brown.
By Gallery 4, the marks on the canvases strike at the viewer with painterly insistence. It’s always salutary to be reminded how misleading coloured illustrations can be. The work of some artists actually looks better in print, but Hilton’s looks slightly too assertive, more aggressive in reproduction than it actually is. His manner in life may have been combative, but his work never displays the touch of cruelty that sometimes conditioned his remarks. Lord Gowrie has likened Hilton’s painterliness to Manet’s, and there is indeed something of the same dandyish quality to both men’s work. Hilton’s is perhaps a more raggedy elegance, but a definite stylishness (extending even to his self-subversion) pervaded everything he did.
Downstairs again a windowless room curiously named ‘The Studio’ contains a ravishing selection of Hilton’s late gouaches, the works he made in the last years of his life when bedridden and unable to use oil and canvas. A sign nearby reads: ‘Much of Roger Hilton’s art is concerned with the human body. Therefore this display contains paintings and drawings of the nude which some may consider unsuitable for young people. Please contact a member of the staff for further details.’ Does this mean that the Tate’s staff are instructed to show properly vetted members of the public further unsuitable details by Hilton? Or that they will supply smelling salts to the easily shocked? In my mind’s ear Hilton’s laughter is all too audible ...
Here I must declare a sizeable interest. The handsome catalogue accompanying the Tate’s show (£12.95 in softback) contains an essay by me, and I have recently completed a monograph on Hilton, to be published in spring 2007 by Thames & Hudson. And as part of the Hilton revival a new volume has been added to the admirable series of paperbacks on St Ives artists published by the Tate — Roger Hilton by Chris Stephens (£8.99). These slim books are well illustrated in colour and provide a useful introduction to the artist under discussion. Stephens curated the Tate show and writes with enthusiasm backed by a sound knowledge of Hilton’s St Ives contemporaries.
In London, an exhibition devoted to Hilton’s late gouaches has just closed at Jonathan Clark Fine Art in Park Walk, SW10, the gallery which handles the Hilton estate. With prices ranging from £5,000 up to £12,500, these are still not expensive in the context of the Modern British Art boom. (William Scott’s prices, for instance, have gone through the roof recently, and other artists show signs of following.) Two thirds of the Clark exhibition had sold when I visited, which was no surprise. An extremely well-chosen selection, these vivid celebrations of life, made in the face of death, are beautiful, moving and surprisingly varied. Hilton became an expert in the manipulation of colour and texture in gouache, setting off shapes like fireworks, undiminished in his art to the end.
Back in St Ives, and taking advantage of the proximity of the Tate show, is a selling exhibition of Hilton’s drawings, organised in association with the artist’s estate, at the Belgrave Gallery in Fore Street (until 11 November). These are mostly nudes, done in pencil or crayon, and date from the 1970s, with one or two earlier examples. The humour and the restless invention shine out of these works, a way of seeing the world which was piercing in its psychological acuity but always life-affirming. Hilton’s early death robbed the British art scene of a modern master, but at least we have the work, which is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. What we really need next is a full-scale Hilton retrospective, timed to coincide with his centenary in 2011. I hope that Tate Britain has such a project already in mind.
Previous page
