Art
!von Hitchens
John McEwen
The death of Non Hitchens has deprived England of its senior artist of merit — he was 86 — and greatest contemporary landscape painter. More contentiously it can be argued that he was also the creator of the most complete oeuvre in the history of British painting. No scholarly assessment of his achievement should be made without consideration of his pure abstractions, flowerpieces, still-lives, domestic interiors (genre works, in other words), seascapes, 'comely' nudes (as Wyndham Lewis so aptly described them) and the massive commissioned murals at Sussex University and Cecil Sharpe House. Why then, you may ask, has he not received the same publicity, the record-breaking auction prices, the international acclaim, the abundant official honours of his most celebrated English contemporaries? The answer is simple. He never compromised his time or talent.
Much of this singleness of purpose, as he always emphasised, derived from the strength and contentment he discovered with marriage. All he really wanted to do was paint, undistracted by day-to-day business, and Mollie Hitchens fulfilled his dream. The wedding was in 1935 and, although he was already 42, his mature work all post-dates that crucial event. Nor was the effect slow in coming. In 1.937 he ended his more fashionably avant-garde experiments with the boldest of all his abstract works, the Tate's 'Coronation', and produced his first important landscape picture, `Moatlands'. Two more different paintings can hardly be imagined: one dominated by broad planes of red and blue (hence the patriotic title), the other a silvery study of woodland and water, earth and sky. Yet both are uncompromisingly modern (and oriental) in their attention to the purity and independence of the paintwork itself, as an expression of truth to material and the artist's own emotion.
Life is a prerequisite of art, therefore a work of art never dates. It just is. Hitchens was never of fashionable interest, in the way of his more lauded contemporaries, but, significantly, he has been an influence to succeeding generations of painters, not for his style but his example, not to copy but to emulate. For the last 40 years he held to a fixed position in the artistic stream, undisturbed by spates of novelty or droughts of uninterest. That the nourishing grubs of political and official acknowledgement came his way largely irrespective of his own efforts, can be gauged by their regular, if desultory, appearances to the present. His first retrospective was with Henry Moore in 1946, his last at the Academy this February. In between he was honoured steadily but not fulsomely, and this was appropriate both to his method and personality. By rights he should have been given honorary membership of the Academy and an OM, but neither could have been more delightful to him than the brief decoration of his coat by a rare white admiral butterfly only days before he died.
Ivon's detachment from politics and, latterly, his avoidance of London, inevitably gave rise to rumours that he was an anti social, even difficult man. The reverse was true. Over the years there were many, and gratefully I speak as one of them, who derived peace and unsolicited encouragement from visits to the Hitchens's Petworth hideaway; while Ivon's inspiring letters will always testify to his personal generosity, wry humour and sweetness of nature. A characteristic example is the following answer to a biographical enquiry of mine last year: '3.3. 1893 Pisces. The fishes going in opposite directions [here an illustration in emphasis]. John Bunyan wrote of a not very nice character "Mr Facing Both Ways". So — anything I do or say may be countermanded in the next breath. This gives me a sense of humble insecurity.' But, of course, his convictions were rocklike. 'Art is not reporting. It is memory.' Or: 'When one paints before the face of nature one should Bow weakly before HER — then throw caution to the winds and plunge in. Wherefore all art school training is suspect, orthodoxy art is suspect, for technique should follow no training rules but develop according to the individual needs of the immediate subject.'
No one I have met has shown a greater awe of the natural world, be it in the form of the mighty Spanish chestnut which inspired several of his final canvases, or the bejewelled trout he conjured from the darkness of one of the several ponds he had built pictorially to enliven an encroaching thicket of rhododendrons. Like that artistic companion of his youth, Ben Nicholson, he could convey his impressions in words as well as paint. 'Towering and immense ultramarine clouds pile up from the South West and the faded gold leaves are lovely against it — such a welcome change from the deep silent frost of this past week.' But, for painting, it was 'the still quiet grey days' he valued most. Ivon's christian name is old English for John, and by the very nature of his choice to live in the secrecy of a wood in deepest Sussex, even in his slightly elfin appearance, there was something of Robin Goodfellow about him, It shows too in the paintings. They are quintessentially English for all his love of Cezanne and the Europeans — English in the old sense, before the Protestant Fall. Now he is dead his friends and many admirers will find consolation in the knowledge that Mollie Hitchens has decided to continue to serve his interests in that magical house they made; that he painted to the end and where he died in his sleep.
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