BOOKS & ARTSExhibitions
Flower power
Laura Freeman
Ivon Hitchens: Space
through Colour
Pallant House Gallery, until 13 OctoberSet down the secateurs, silence the strim-
mers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.
Ivon Hitchens was a painter of hedgerow
and undergrowth, bracken and bramble.
Whoosh! go his seedlings, sprouting, bolt-
ing, demanding repotting. The first Hitchens
you see on the wall outside this exhibition
at Pallant House is his lithograph ‘Still Life’
(1938). A squabble of stems break bounds,
vault the vase, bid for freedom. I’m a wild-
flower, get me out of here.
‘I love flowers for painting,’ Hitchens
said. ‘Not a carefully arranged bunch such
as people ought not to do — but doing a
mixed bunch in a natural way.’ If his posies
were ever bridal bouquets they have longsince been thrown, trampled, sat on by an
usher and shoved in an ice bucket to revive.
Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979) was a trier-
outer. The early landscapes, such as ‘Didling
on the Downs’ (1920s), are irresolute:
sort of Seurat, semi-Cézanne. Hitchens’s
‘Curved Barn’ (1922) is a self-conscious tilt
at Cézanne, cubism and Clive Bell’s woolly
doctrine of ‘significant form’.
In the have-a-go 1920s, Hitchens dab-
bled with Bloomsbury — all that shrimp
skin, all those bare bottoms in ‘The Pool’
(1927–8) owe something to Duncan Grant
— and experimented with a style which, if
not quite cubist, was certainly cub-ish. The
Mr Blobby contours of Hitchens’s ‘Interiors
at Barmoor Castle’ (1928) have, by the fol-
lowing year’s ‘Henry Moore at Work in his
Studio, Parkhill Road, Hampstead’ (1929),
hardened into something more dynamic
and scalpel-edged.
In 1921 Hitchens exhibited with the
Seven and Five Society, a changing cast
of painters and sculptors committed to
being uncommitted. There had of late, they
argued, been too many -isms, too many ‘war-ring sects’ and ‘too much pioneering along
too many lines in altogether too much of
a hurry’. The object of the Seven and Five
members, according to their softly-softly
manifesto, ‘is merely to express what they
feel in terms that shall be intelligible, and
not to demonstrate a theory nor to attack a
tradition.’ So: express yourself.
Through the Seven and Five Hitchens
found friendship with Ben and Winifred
Nicholson. In 1925, he stayed at Banks-
head, the Nicholson’s Cumberland farm-
house. His ‘Winter Hyacinths’ (c.1932) are
much in Winifred’s wildflowers-and-win-
dowsill mode, but where Winifred’s flower
pieces shimmer, Hitchens’s are sludgy, the
colour of jam-jar water after a day’s water-
colouring.
It is in Hampstead in the 1930s, in paint-
ings such as ‘Spring Mood no. 2’ (1933)
and ‘Azaleas no. 2’ (c.1931), that every-
thing becomes looser and more blousy. His
vases still have the hard planes of cubism,
but nature, stuffed into bowls, jars, teacups
and stood on old plates to catch the drips,
starts to sing. Music mattered to Hitchens.
He could not himself play (though he liked
to pretend at the guitar), but he sought in
his work something he called ‘visual sound’.
He likened line, form, plane, shape, tone
and colour to ‘the instruments of a paint-
er’s orchestra’. He found an affinity with a
frieze-like format in which pots, plants, urns
and saucers play like notes across a stave.
The second world war forced a move to
Lavington Common in West Sussex where
Hitchens settled with his wife and son John
in a caravan in 1940. He later built a house
he called Greenleaves. In a photo taken in
the woods Hitchens stands like an archer in
front of his easel: Robin Hood with palette
and brush for a bow and arrow. In works
such as ‘Tangled Pool’ (1946) he becomes a
latterday John Constable, if Constable had
waded in up to his ankles and crouched for
a bullrush-eye view. Some of his river paint-
ings carry you along with the current, oth-
ers leave you becalmed, still as a mill pond.
When he paints nudes with lobsterish
limbs in the manner of Matisse’s odalisques
you wish him back in the potting shed. It’s
all about the flower power, about his gift
for transforming a bottle stoppered with
cuttings into a carnival of carnations and
a dahlia jamboree. At his best, in works such
as ‘Flowers’ (1942), Hitchens makes you
reel in the hothouse haze.
Don’t miss a display in Room 6 of the
permanent collection that recreates the
Thirty Four Gallery, a model modern exhi-
bition space, commissioned by the deal-
er Sydney Burney in 1934. Vanessa Bell,
Augustus John, Cedric Morris, Paul Nash
and Barbara Hepworth were invited by
Burney to make miniature paintings and
sculptures for a doll’s house exhibition. The
tiny Hitchens, not much larger than a cook’s
matchbox, is pick of the bunch.‘Flowers’, 1942, by Ivon Hitchens©THE ESTATE OF IVON HITCHENS