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  • Ivon Hitchens and the Harmony of Colour
  • David Gervais
Selected Works of Ivon Hitchens. Pallant Gallery, Chichester, 1 June–7 October 2007
Ivon Hitchens by Peter Khoroche. New edition, revised and enlarged. Lund Humphries, 2007. $46.33. ISBN 0 8533 1936 7

L'harmonie est la base de la théorie de la couleur.La mélodie est l'unité dans la couleur, ou la couleurgénérale.

(Baudelaire, Curiosités Estéthiques)

To go by our received taste in landscape painters over the last century is to surmise that not enough people have seen just how good Ivon Hitchens was. I don't simply mean that he was better than Nash or Sutherland (or Hockney) but that his approach to landscape was inherently different. The small, well-chosen selection of his work at Pallant House provided an opportunity to clarify this. I shall also touch on the huge success of the gallery itself since the launch of the extension that the late Colin St John Wilson designed for it.

To begin with, one needs to look at Hitchens's formation as a painter. The new edition of Peter Khoroche's monograph on him gives one all one needs to know: the uneventful life, absorbed in painting, his scattered thoughts on his art and, best of all, a superb selection of fine colour illustrations of it. (These justify the book's price on their own.) Khoroche is sensible rather than brilliant, but he gets one off to a good start. For instance, he [End Page 87] is not so dazzled by the later Hitchens that he fails to see the significance of his deceptively conventional beginnings. Once out of the Royal Academy schools, Hitchens, like many painters of his time, came under the sway of Roger Fry. He imbibed the doctrine of 'significant form' and with it the notion that colour was an adjunct to form rather than an equal partner to it. In some of his more sober early works one even finds echoes of the kind of drab fidelity of Fry's own landscapes. Even the art of Cézanne, which provided the impetus to go beyond such half-fledged modernism, was mediated to him through Fry's criticism and even in the 1930s, as a founder member of the Seven and Five Club in Hampstead, he did not completely break with Fry. The club's pursuit of a peculiarly English version of abstraction did not displace Fry's emphasis on 'design'. Moreover, since Hitchens only theorised with a brush in his hand, his innovations were easily missed. Paradoxically, his originality only began to emerge through his response to Cézanne, which was very different from Fry's. (At this time a conventional art critic would not have noticed the difference at all.) For all his devotion to Cézanne, Fry was much more comfortable with his painting in the 1880s and 1890s than he was with the late work. What he liked best were the rigorously ordered and constructed landscapes in which the painter, for all his modernity, was still the evident heir of Poussin. Hitchens, on the other hand, was drawn to the Dionysian chromaticism of the very late paintings of the Jas de Bouffan and the Bibémus quarry, buildings in landscape like the subjects he had begun to paint himself in Sussex. In these works, and not before, Cézanne's 'petite sensation' acquired a kind of visionary fire, its colour becoming rapt and glowing almost to the point of deliquescence. Paintings like the late ones of the Mont Sainte-Victoire may retain elements of the structure of the earlier work but their colour is alive with an energy that left a critic like Fry at a loss.1 It is this colour that was decisive for Hitchens's own art.

Once Hitchens arrived at a style of his own, with his exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, the distinctive features of his work became clear, most strikingly his predilection for long horizontal canvases for his landscapes. Their oblong shape created a rhythm across the whole picture, drawing the eye naturally through its varying forms. He himself likened this...

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