The Art Exhibitions Blog

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 influe...

The Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) is perhaps not very well known outside France and his homeland, but the Royal Academy in London is staging the first comprehensive exhibition in Britain, starting on June 30, of his quite varied work, which often conveys a sense of unease.  Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet  brings together more than 80 pictures, the majority of them loans from Switzerland. Fans of the Nabis and the German New Objectivity movement will find much to admire. Until September 29. And, of course, it's that time of year again at the Royal Academy: The Summer Exhibition , with well over 1,000 new works on show, starts on June 10 and runs until August 12. At the British Library, Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion provides an opportunity to explore the science, artistry and inventions of three of Leonardo's notebooks in another exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. It brings together manuscripts owned by the library, the V&A...

A couple of weeks ago, we saw how Vincent van Gogh 's Sunflowers were enormously influential on the work of 20th-century British artists. In works by Frank Brangwyn, Jacob Epstein and Christopher Wood on display at Tate Britain, there was daring colour and brushwork, and yet their sunflowers and chrysanthemums were instantly recognisable. But we've just been to see a show featuring another British flower painter whose work is really quite different. Ivon Hitchens painted landscapes and plants inside and outside his secluded West Sussex studio with vibrant use of colour, but over a long career his canvases became increasingly abstract. Ivon Hitchens: The Painter in the Woods at the Garden Museum in London tells part of his story. Hitchens was at one stage a pretty big name: In the 1950s he had regular major exhibitions in London, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale  in 1956 and had no difficulty in finding buyers for his works. And he's right back in the spotl...