Ivon Hitchens: Discover the Bigger Picture in Chichester

We felt a little bit short-changed a few weeks ago when we went to see Ivon Hitchens's flower paintings in a smallish exhibition at the Garden Museum in London. A big new show at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, Ivon Hitchens: Space through Colour, gives a much broader impression of the vibrancy and range of the artist's work. We enjoyed it from start to finish.

West Sussex is an appropriate place to look back at Hitchens's long career, because he spent a lot of time in the county. The earliest works in this show include landscapes made during visits in the 1920s; he moved to a caravan near Petworth when bombed out of his London home and studio in World War II, and in his old age he bought a property by the sea in Selsey. And the two very first works in the Pallant collection were by Hitchens. He's a local artist then, but by no means a parochial one.

We get the full overview during this comprehensive show, which demonstrates how his work was hugely influenced by leading British and international trends and became increasingly colourful and abstracted over the decades without losing the sense that he was picturing very specifically what he saw around him.

"Don't try to find a picture," Hitchens said. "Find a place you like and discover the picture in that."

The very first picture you see in this exhibition sees lambs frolicking in green fields at Didling on the Downs, not too far from Chichester, the hills rising up behind. It's fairly flatly painted, but a very straightforward representation of a rural landscape; there's nothing particularly striking about it, nothing to prepare you for what might be coming along later.

But what about Curved Barn from 1922? The depiction is of a scene just five miles away in Heyshott, but it's almost another world. Hitchens had been reading the writings of the critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, developing a realisation of the importance of form, colour and line. This was a picture that marked a significant turn in Hitchens's career, signalling his engagement with progressive ideas in contemporary art as well as showing the influence of Paul Cézanne.

Those curves have a 1920s feel to them: You can see something not too dissimilar in many of the prints in the excellent Cutting Edge show now at Dulwich. 

Hitchens's art quite quickly became more abstracted, it seems. This view from 1925 was painted from a window at Ben and Winifred Nicholson's farmhouse in Cumbria, where Hitchens sometimes stayed. Hitchens was developing his own visual language, and those blocks and swathes of colour that you can see here are still visible in his late paintings. It's inside looking out, very much a Hitchens view. 

Hitchens was a leading member of an experimental group, the Seven and Five Society, that included the Nicholsons, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He did take an excursion into almost full-blown abstraction in the 1930s, and here's one of the works from that period: Coronation, painted just after King George VI was crowned in 1937. Hitchens gave the painting its title because of its "regal" expression of colour, but he warned that "it would be unwise to seek for any more direct symbolism."

It's perhaps Hitchens's landscapes that he's best known for, painted on a very horizontal canvas that induces the eye to follow a sort of storyline from left to right; he took the format from Georges Braque. It's a bit like being in a theatre, and indeed Winter Stage from 1936, divided vertically into three sections, was a breakthrough painting for Hitchens.   

This painting's actually almost three times as wide as it is high, but Hitchens was consistently to use a double-square format for his landscape works. 

We occasionally find at the Pallant that a couple of the rooms in their exhibitions aren't as exciting as the rest of the show, but on this occasion there's no let-up; Hitchens's work is fascinating throughout; he went on for decades but the images remain fresh. His star was perhaps at its highest in the 1950s, when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. 

The landscapes are often stunning; these are not pictures that you look at and recognise a view, but there's a mood, and an atmosphere, to them that evokes a sense of being there. Red Boat and Bushes, a work from around 1970, was one of our favourites.

And what's really striking about Hitchens's late paintings is the increased vibrancy of the palette, with an explosion of stunning reds and pinks. You see this particularly in paintings of the Sussex coast. We really liked Outside, painted in 1965, the year Hitchens turned 72.

The Hitchens show is accompanied by a display of photographs, a film and audio recordings by Simon Roberts, looking at (and listening to) the locations in Sussex Hitchens painted in. They certainly take you into the countryside that Hitchens loved.

We really enjoyed this show, one of the best we've seen at our local (and far from parochial) gallery. Very much recommended.

Practicalities

Ivon Hitchens: Space through Colour is on at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until October 13. The gallery is open 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays (late until 2000 on Thursdays) and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays. Admission costs a standard £12.50, or a bargain £6.50 all day on Tuesdays and after 1700 on Thursdays. 

The gallery is less than 10 minutes' walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half an hour from London Victoria on weekdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes. 

Images

Ivon Hitchens, Curved Barn, 1922, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © The Estate of Ivon Hitchens
Ivon Hitchens, A Border Day (Morning, Bankshead), 1925, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. © The Estate of Ivon Hitchens, Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Ivon Hitchens, Coronation, 1937, Tate
Ivon Hitchens, Winter Stage, 1936, Tate. © Tate, London 2019
Ivon Hitchens, Red Boat and Bushes, c. 1970, Private collection
Ivon Hitchens, Outside, 1975, Private collection