Art
Pastorale
John McEwen
!von Hitchens (Waddington 1 and 2 till 3 July) is a painters' painter. If you really look at his pictures you will soon find that they are more to do with the paint itself— the relationship of one colour to another, one depth, one brushstroke to another— than with what the paint describes. They are therefore not literary: there are no symbols in them. They are not impressionist because they are not impressions, though they are invariably done out of doors, and (more technically) they incorporate more than one viewpoint of the subject under analysis. And they are not romantic or even expressionist, in the normal sense, because they are not .intended as expressions of the painter's mood. They are more objective. They are, in Cezanne's phrase, about the artist's 'realising his sensations before nature.' Painters' paintings.
And yet Hitchens, though always a loner, has achieved a degree of popularity as well as critical acclaim over the years. It is less than he deserves and is still disproportionate to the reputations of such artistic contemporaries as Moore, Nicholson and possibly others, but its proof of his accessibility is the final hallmark of his stature as a painter. Do not be put off therefore by the professionalism of his work. Least of all in the present exhibition, which fills two galleries and is a real Indian summer of a show in the best Matisse tradition.
And it is Matisse who most comes to mind when you look for derivations in these pictures, which are the most brightly coloured of Hitchens's career. This hot colour could be explained by a preference in the selection for flower, sea and figure studies were it not for the landscapes revealing a similar, if less dramatic, tendency. Few English artists have painted brighter than this, and the titles only underline the fact : 'After a Bathe No. l', the voluptuous female form glowing a ruddy magenta, 'A Sea of Flowers', 'Flowers in Hot Sun' and so on. No doubt in part due to the exceptional summers of the past two years, this brilliance also conveys an altogether new order of freedom and passion in 'the artist's work.
Thecolour, combined with a more worked paint surface, makes some of these pictures deceptively sensational and decorative, and readily attractive to an untutored eye. However if they are Fauvist in the resonance of their colour, they also remain cubist in structure. And the two are invariably best harmonised, as always, in the landscapes. Many of Hitchens's landscapes of the 'fifties and 'sixties sacrificed clarity and earthiness —worthy successors in several outstanding cases to Constable's oil sketches—for a more vibrant, brushstroked and abstract effect which lent itself to overworked confusion. The more deliberate composition and colour of his flower and figure studies have reintroduced a greater simplicity into his landscapes, and consequently these now have greater impact than before without losing that outdoor depth and distance which afford Hitchens the full range of his experience in a picture like the recent 'December Citadel'.
This is a fine show, particulary that part of it on view in Gallery 1. Hitchens's paintings, so redolent of the subtleties of shade and vegetation in the tunnelled wood around his home, require more looking than a review can properly convey. Often the ones you liked least look best in the end, but perhaps it is most helpful in realising their full potential to repeat his own description : 'My paintings are painted to be listened to.'
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